Migrant Futures PDF

MIGRANT FUTURES
Duke University Press Durham and London 2018

Aimee Bahng
MIGRANT FUTURES
Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times
© 2018 Duke University Press. All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Text designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and typeset in
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bahng, Aimee, [date] author.
Title: Migrant futures : decolonizing speculation in
financial times / Aimee Bahng.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2017025278 (print) |
lccn 2017041274 (ebook)
isbn 9780822373018 (ebook)
isbn 9780822363644 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822363798 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Speculative fiction. | Finance in
literature. | Future, The, in literature. | Speculation.
Classification: lcc pn98.f56 (ebook) | lcc pn98.f56
b346 2017 (print) | ddc 809.3/876—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025278
Cover art: Sonny Liew, art from Malinky Robot.

Courtesy of the artist.
for Dara
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C on ten ts
Preface - ix Acknowledgments - xiii
Introduction. O N S P E C U L AT I O N
Fiction, Finance, and Futurity - 1
1. I M P E R I A L R U B B E R The Speculative Arcs of

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Rainforest Futures - 25
2. H O M E L A N D F U T U R I T Y
Speculations at the Border - 51
3. S P E C U L AT I O N A N D T H E S P E C U L U M
Surrogations of Futurity - 79
4. T H E C R U E L O P T I M I S M O F T H E A S I A N C E N T U RY - 119
5. S A LT F I S H F U T U R E S The Irradiated Transpacific
and the Financialization of the Human Genome Project - 146
Epilogue. S P E C U L AT I O N A S D I S C O U R S E,
S P E C U L AT I O N A S E X U B E R A N C E - 168
Notes - 171 Bibliography - 201 Index - 217

P reface
This project emerges in many ways from my particular affiliation with Pasa-
dena, California—longtime home not only of the Jet Propulsion Labora-
tory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) and the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the science and engineering
powerhouse, but also of the black speculative fiction writer Octavia Estelle
Butler (1947–2006). In an obituary for this “Sister from Another Planet,”
Jervey Tervalon describes Butler’s hometown as a “racially explosive com-
munity, where blacks and whites frequently encounter each other—unlike
so much of Los Angeles where freeway distance gives a false sense of
security.”1 Against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s suburban sprawl, filled
with gated communities that would inform the postapocalyptic terrain of
Butler’s Parable series, Tervalon tells the story of a “racist Pasadena that
Jackie Robinson, another native son, hated and never wanted to return to.”
Though this black-white polarity had already been complicated for many
years by steady migrations of Latinos and Asians to the San Gabriel Valley,
the Pasadena I came to know during my upbringing nonetheless remained
a racially tense and divided environment. In official settings (such as school
and sponsored activities), I often found myself pulled into a strained nar-
rative of multiculturalist assimilation—the token Asian poster child in
a rainbow delegation for Pasadena’s self-promotion as a diverse city that
manufactured model minorities in every shade, even as it doled out rou-
tine servings of racist messages scrawled in shaving cream on our driveway,
or flung xenophobic “Go back to China!” calls from neighborhood bullies
on bikes.
Los Angeles, more broadly, was a place that, as Mike Davis has pointed
out, witnessed the conjuncture of a postwar, science-based economy (Cal-
tech and nasa) and the “imagineering” ethos of Disney and Hollywood in
the second half of the twentieth century.2 In City of Quartz, Davis suggests
that this convergence of an expansive community of scientists and engi-
neers and the commercial film and television industry produced a hotbed
of science fiction. My own interest in science fiction, no doubt influenced
to some degree by the reasons Davis gives, also happened to take shape
alongside my earliest formations of racial consciousness and feminist-
queer community. I sought and found a sense of outsider commiseration
in the video arcades and comic book stores. While there was no shortage of
the more stereotypical white, suburban geeks who turned to what was then
still a subculture as a place they could dominate—a smaller pond in which
to be a big fish—the realm of science fiction was also a bustling contact
zone for urban youth of color whose interests in popular media affiliated
with science fiction (film, television, comic books, and video games) consti-
tuted one of the few opportunities for cross-ethnic solidarities in an other-
wise segregated and gender-normative landscape. Science fiction, which
constituted fugitive reading in my household, offered not only a break from
more canonical, achievement-oriented reading regimens, but also a place
for many people to take refuge from the social realities of racially unequal
systems of housing, fissured with decades of redlining practices and the
dismantling of public transportation, libraries, education, parks, and other
meeting places in a period of relentless privatization. In the context of ex-
periencing geeks of color in queer, playful assembly in the literary, gaming,
and role-playing worlds affiliated with science fiction, I began to wonder
why this genre, some of which has facilitated an off-world repository for
Orientalist, imperialist, and misogynist desires in an era of political cor-
rectness, might nonetheless harbor a set of alternative possibilities for anti-
racist, feminist, and queer critique.
Reading science fiction also performed a certain work on me—work for
which I had already been primed. Most of the books I was asked to read in
school required that I step into the shoes of the usually white, male, prep-
school protagonists of works like A Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace.
I certainly felt a tinge of injustice (Where were all the female protagonists?
Even the animals seemed to have names of boys I knew), which meant that
I also recognized how powerful the act of reading could be. In being re-
peatedly asked to relate to these unfamiliar social positions, contexts, and
problems of the East Coast boarding school; comprehend homosocial haz-
ing environments; and understand the brooding psychic landscape of those
teenage boy characters, I developed a capacity to reach beyond my im-
x - P R E FA C E
mediate frames of reference in order to grasp at someone else’s sensorium.
These classic novels of adolescent angst presumed a reader’s familiarity or
identification with the protagonist. That presumption worked through the
tacit presentation of these works as realist fiction, whereas my experience
of those worlds was one of utter alienation. The literary canon’s unspoken
promise to deliver universal human experience imposed a narrow field of
feeling, relating to, and being in the world that felt to me more like science
fiction than the books I kept stashed between my mattress and box spring
at home. In this sense, my experience was similar to that of other people
of color who have reflected on being drawn to reading materials character-
ized by their otherworldliness.3 The authors of the science fiction to which
I was drawn (such as Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R.
Delany) took pleasure in catching the reader jumping to conclusions about
what was familiar and what was strange. The reader who was willing to set
aside her assumptions of how the world worked would often be rewarded
with an easier acclimation to alternative ontologies, epistemologies, and
universes. Reading science fiction became for me a practice of unlearning
hegemonic principles.
I began writing Migrant Futures many years ago as a project that iden-
tified the potential in science fiction to do antiracist and antinormative
work. My understanding of speculation as praxis became all the more
charged when I began to push my thinking about speculation beyond the
framework of genre. When I began to see forms of speculation all around
me—most significantly in the ever-burgeoning financial sector, but also in
the insurance industry, histories of imperial expansion, and generally the
crafting of futurity across a wide array of platforms—I resolved to broaden
the scope of what could have been a fairly narrow literary study to an ex-
amination of a wider culture of future-telling. This initial impulse to take
my original questions to the field of economic and financial speculation
was spurred on by the provocative claim that it is “easier to imagine the end
of the world than the end of capitalism.”4 What follows might be consid-
ered a “starter archive” of attempts to imagine if not the end of capitalism,
then an alternative to it, by way of those who may find themselves mired
in capitalism or displaced by it, but who continue to speculate beyond its
logics.5 What I have assembled here is a promiscuous set of cultural texts,
often paired in ways that highlight a tension between fortune-telling in the
service of capitalism and migrant futures that dare to imagine a world be-
yond it.
P R E FA C E - xi
Ackn owl e d gmen ts
If speculation is a practice of world making, completing this book simi-

larly required the cosmological aggregation of many generative think-
ers. My earliest teachers, who first grabbed hold of my imagination and
shook off my assumptions of how the world could be, were the aforemen-
tioned writers of science fiction: Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany,
and Ursula K. LeGuin. Though their works of fiction are not the objects
of analysis in this project, the force of their fabulations rewired my brain
early on and instigated a whole lifetime of critical inquiry. I am also deeply
grateful to the convivial and critically acute group of thinkers called an un-
certain commons, whose collaboratively written and collectively published
Speculate This! serves as a sort of companion manifesto to Migrant Futures.
It has been thinking in common with folks like these as well as the inimi-
table Donna Haraway and all of the feminist-queer science and technology
studies students who have been inspired by her work, that has made this
book a possibility.
Migrant Futures began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of
California, San Diego (ucsd), where I not only received crucial guidance
and support but also found the best models of bringing scholarly pursuits,
teaching practices, and political commitments together in meaningful
ways. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge Shelley Streeby, whose
steadfast encouragement and level-headed focus on political work (and the
politics of work) sustained a whole cadre of students, myself included, who
would take to heart her daily practice of showing up when it mattered and
growing a sense of solidarity too rarely experienced in our line of work. My
heartfelt thanks also go to Lisa Bloom, Lisa Cartwright, Michael David-
son, Page duBois, the late Rosemary Marangoly George, J. Jack Halberstam,
Nicole King, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Eileen Myles, Roddey Reid, Winnie
Woodhull, and Lisa Yoneyama. It was at ucsd that I encountered some of
the most lasting teacher-interlocutor-friends. Neel Ahuja, Kyla Schuller,
and Elizabeth Steeby: I am so lucky to have you in my corner. I would be
remiss not to acknowledge also the solidarity and mentorship I received
from several women of color in the cohort who graduated just prior to me,
including: Neda Atanasoski, Jinah Kim, Su Yun Kim, and Gabriela Nuñez.
There are many more I would like to name, but suffice it to say that I feel
honored to count myself a part of an extensive ucsd intellectual family.
I have had strong and caring teachers all along. Among those who
helped show me a path of scholarly and political commitments are teach-
ers from my time at Princeton University and the Bread Loaf School of
English: Wendy Chun, Gina Dent, Diana Fuss, Martin Harries, Claudia
Johnson, Tom Keenan, Arthur Little, Wahneema Lubiano, Emily Martin,
Jeff Nunokawa, D. Vance Smith, Claire Sponsler, Cornel West, and Hertha
Sweet Wong.
This book’s engagement with finance culture was significantly enriched
from my time with the University of California Humanities Research Insti-
tutes Residential Research Group, “Speculative Globalities.” This space of
convivial collaboration brought me into a new set of reading, thinking, and
writing practices that has expanded what I thought possible in academe.
To Cesare Casarino, Bishnu Ghosh, Colin Milburn, Geeta Patel, Rita Raley,
Bhaskar Sarkar, and Sudipta Sen: I thank you for all you taught me in intel-
lectual spheres as well as in culinary appetites.
More recently I have had the great pleasure of reading and thinking
in common with Kiran Asher, Jennifer Hamilton, Rebecca Herzig, Banu
Subramaniam, and Angie Willey. Together, we have constituted a feminist
science and technology studies research group based in New England, and
that camaraderie has been tremendously inspiring and productive for this
work. Banu and Angie have extended their caring attention to me when I
needed it most, and I hope to be able to keep reciprocating that care for the
rest of our lives. A little farther afield, I have found other feminist-queer-
geek-confabulators, such as Alexis Lothian and Rebekah Sheldon, who re-
mind me that sometimes the best critics are also fans.
Much of this work evolved over the course of presenting its compo-
nent ideas as talks given at the Five Colleges; Stanford University; Seoul
National University; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and, on sev-
eral occasions, the annual Futures of American Studies Institute. Being
invited into international and transdisciplinary scholarly arenas has been
xi v - A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
rewarding, and I want to thank the generous audiences at the national con-
ferences where I have presented this work, including the annual meetings
of the American Studies Association, the Association of Asian American
Studies, the Modern Language Association, the National Women’s Studies
Association, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Asian American Studies has over the past decade become an increasingly
important intellectual community for me, and so many folks have gone out
of their way to engage my scholarship and support my career in multitudi-
nous ways. For their intellectual and emotional labor, I owe a great debt to:
Jason Oliver Chang, Kandice Chuh, David Eng, Christopher Fan, Catherine
Fung, Tammy Ho, Betsy Huang, Jinny Huh, Joseph Jeon, Rachel C. Lee,
Sue J. Kim, Martin Manalansan, Anita Mannur, Christine Mok, Lisa Naka-
mura, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Stephen Sohn, and Min Hyoung Song.
During my time at Dartmouth, I was lucky to find an intellectual com-
munity that carved out a space for coalitional and communal living and
thinking. Though many of us are now part of a Dartmouth diaspora, our
overlapping time together laid the groundwork for friendships that outlast
the vicissitudes of institutional affiliation. Special thanks to: Laura Braun-
stein, Adrienne Clay, Mary Coffey, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Reena Godlthree,
Christian Haines, Max Hantel, Rashauna Johnson, Eng-Beng Lim, Abby
Neely, Tanalis Padilla, Julia Rabig, Russell Rickford, Naaborko Sackeyfio-
Lenoch, Jeff Sharlet, Craig Sutton, Derrick and Stephanie White, and more
generally, the Ferguson Teaching Collective.
Dartmouth College also provided various forms of structural support for
the production of this manuscript. Thanks to the Walter and Leslie Center
for the Humanities, the Walter and Constance Burke Research Initiation
Award, the Gender Research Institute, and the Dean of Faculty’s Junior
Faculty Fellowship. Several senior colleagues (Colleen Boggs, Andrew
McCann, Don Pease, Barbara Will, and Melissa Zeiger) also read portions
of the work, and I thank the English department and Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies program in particular for providing the space and time
to grow this project among you. Dartmouth also became an institutional
member of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. I
have found valuable mentorship, commiseration, and guidance in my Fac-
ulty Success Program alumnae group there, as well as among the many
women and nonbinary people of color in academia on social media.
Thanks, too, to Ken Wissoker and the entire editorial team at Duke Uni-
versity Press, including Elizabeth Ault, Sara Leone, and Jeanne Ferris. Ken
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S - xv
has believed in this work for many years, and without his unwavering sup-
port and care manifested in many ways, it would never have come to frui-
tion. Sincere thanks also to Sara, who peeked out from behind the project
editor’s track changes to share an uncommon level of empathy during a
particularly rough patch. Before the manuscript arrived at Duke, I was able
to have the incisive, generous, and witty Josh Rutner, my freelance friend-
editor, prepare it for more official eyes. It is a pleasure to work with such
attuned and deeply committed editors.
Sometimes, extraordinary measures taken by a tightly knit fabric of
friends and family are the only way a project gets completed. Among all
those who held my hand or helped drag me across the finish line, Bill Boyer
has probably had to shoulder most of this loving labor. One could not dream
of a more steadfast partner across so many terrains, and I am deeply grate-
ful to be facing the world with the best of teammates.
This book is for my families, who are listed above in porous groupings,
but in many ways, it is a book that comes out of my first family. For this rea-
son, I want to acknowledge most tenderly Joon, Jaisoo, and Gene Bahng,
who instilled in me a love of critical inquiry that sustains the speculations
that follow.
Some of the individual chapters listed below were previously published
in different versions. “Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Im-
perial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through
the Arc of the Rain Forest,” “Alien/Asian,” edited by Stephen H. Sohn, spe-
cial issue, melus 33, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 123–44; “The Cruel Optimism of
Asian Futurity and Reparative Practices in Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot,”
in Techno-Orientalism, edited by Betsy Huang, Greta Niu, and David Roh
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 163–79; “Specters
of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Ge-
netic Modification,” “Fictions of Speculation,” edited by Hamilton Carroll
and Annie McClanahan, special issue, Journal of American Studies, 49, no. 4
(Fall 2015): 663–79.
xvi - A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
I n tro d u cti on
O N S P E C U L AT I O N
Fiction, Finance, and Futurity
We need visions of the future, and our people need them more than most.
—S A M U E L D E L A N Y , “The Necessity of Tomorrows,” 1978 address at
the Studio Museum in Harlem
You’ve got to make your own worlds. You’ve got to write yourself in.
—O C TAV I A B U T L E R , “Octavia Butler on Charlie Rose”
We must organize our methods to illuminate the relation between culture and econ-
omy, thus refusing to separate, as has been the practice, the operational and mathe-
matical techniques of the derivatives markets from their social implications.
—E D WA R D L I P U M A A N D B E N J A M I N L E E , Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk
As of December 2014, approximately $710 trillion of the world’s capital

was circulating in the global financial derivatives market, a metamarket
of trading in commodity futures, options, and swaps.1 It is a statistic de-
signed to stagger. Economists call it a “notional figure,” as it serves as more
of a placeholder of value than actual money changing hands; it is alien
currency from another time, from a time out of joint, from the future an-
terior.2 This notional figure of future-refracted value shimmers in the dis-
tance like a desert mirage, with social factors such as risk and optimism
flickering across its screen of projection. Even as economists apply mathe-
matical algorithms to render their extrapolations more supple, accurate,
and complex, the market in financial derivatives—tethered notionally to
its underlying assets—relies on an engine of speculation, extrapolation,
and projection to render value out of the not yet. Derivatives function as
insurance policies, working to hedge against the uncertainty of speculative
futures. What Marx termed “fictitious capital” emerged notably out of the
national debt and credit systems of his day in the form of promissory notes
with no link to underlying assets.3 Characterizing these financial claims
on debtors as predatory lending, Marx described usury capital as parasiti-
cal on money wealth: “It sucks its blood, kills its nerve.”4 Marx’s figuration
of fictitious capital as vampiric5 and the “notional figure” of the financial
derivatives market point to the central role of fiction crafting and figuration
in the production of finance capitalism.
This book puts into conversation speculative finance and speculative
fiction as two forms of extrapolative figuration that participate in the cul-
tural production of futurity. To put these two seemingly disparate arenas
of narrative production into conversation, I largely use the methodologies
of an emerging field that could be called critical finance studies in con-
junction with a longer standing field called feminist science studies, which
trained me to beware of the “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere”
purveyed by the seemingly pure, objective vision of scientific and capital-
ist realism.6 It is indeed a god trick to get people to mistake prophecy for
truth, notional figure for value, or futurity for the future. As a lifetime stu-
dent of the power of narrative to alter reality, or at least perceptions of it,
I have often been awed by fiction’s nearly magical actuarial potency. By
approaching both speculative finance and speculative fiction as narrative
productions, I emphasize the performativity of economics and therefore
the potential power of the literary imagination to call forth new political
economies, ways of living, and alternative relational structures; and differ-
ent sorts of subjects into the world.
I use the term “futurity” to highlight the construction of the future and
denaturalize its singularity, while maintaining an emphasis on how nar-
rative constructions of the future play a significant role in materializing
the present. “Extrapolation,” for example, is the name for the mathemati-
cal modeling practice economists use to predict future commodity prices
and investment trends based on data compiled in databases such as the
2 - INTRODUCTION
crb Commodity Yearbook, Wharton Research Data Services, as well as Global
Financial Data Solutions. At the same time, science fiction studies might
first associate extrapolation with the eponymous academic journal, which
publishes scholarly essays on science fiction (also called extrapolative or
speculative fiction). Migrant Futures investigates how we narrate futurity
across various platforms, from speculative fiction to financial speculation.
How do our stories of the future chart the ways we invest—financially,
politically, ideologically, and intellectually—in the present? How do the
logics of preemption break across the shores of financial securitization,
military preparedness, and scientific projection? These are some of the
questions taken up by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, cultural
theorists, and other scholars contributing to an interdisciplinary examina-
tion of financialization.7
Most notably, Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee assert the social con-
struction of financial derivatives—a social construction that, like race,
nonetheless has profound material effects on people’s livelihoods, state
politics, and international conflicts. LiPuma and Lee call derivatives “so-
cially imaginary objects” and assert “the social construction of the various
types of derivatives.”8 They also emphasize the “abstract symbolic violence”
that speculative capital wreaks on the world—“symbolic in the sense that
it is not accomplished physically by means of military force or colonial-
ism, though it may, of course, engender the conditions (such as impover-
ishment) that precipitate violent crime and warfare” and “abstract in the
sense that it never appears directly; rather it mediates and stands behind
local realities—such as interest rates, food costs, and the price of petro-
leum.”9 One poignant example that LiPuma and Lee provide is the effect of
presidential elections on the global economy. In the case of the 2002 Bra-
zilian presidential election, for example, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
of the Worker’s Party was projected to win, “the principal players in the
Latin American financial markets started to sell and short the Brazilian
currency.”10 Electoral projections produced economic reality. As Migrant
Futures headed into the final stages of production, the United States has
witnessed the election of Donald Trump as its president. On the evening
of November 8, 2016, as people watched the results come in, they also
noted the Dow Jones falling precipitously. By morning, though, markets
seemed to have leveled out, and the futures markets in U.S. Steel and pri-
vate prisons in particular were looking quite good, indeed. This last ex-
ample, when read through the burgeoning body of critical work in prison
I N T R O D U C T I O N - 3
abolition movements, yokes the abstract violence of finance capitalism to
more overt manifestations of state violence as exacted through the police
force disproportionately on black and brown, queer and trans bodies in the
United States.
Predicated on prediction, the algorithmic models used in the financial
sector as well as by insurance companies often count on the movements of
legible and calculable subjects. Financial speculation, extrapolation, and
prediction rely on mathematical models and probabilistic logics to trans-
form quantitative data into a narrative arc. By plotting points along a line
on a graph and deriving meaning from those data, these narratives require
a rendering of a trajectory. Though that rendering often takes shape in the
visual field of graphic representation, financial forecasters produce ex-
trapolative fiction when they functionally convert data into an interpre-
tive arc, to be articulated and narrativized in and beyond the graphic form.
Econometrics extrapolates from data collected by the University of Michi-
gan Consumer Sentiment Index and Index of Consumer Expectations, for
example, which reduce sentiment and expectation to numeric values in
an attempt to measure and then advise for or against hedging uncertain
futures. This “datafication” is also a rendering of data into fiction or statis-
tical narrative, which Kathleen Woodward has characterized as “the pre-
eminent expression of late capitalism.”11 Financial speculation produces
a kind of speculative fiction, and despite its overtures to fact over fiction,
it both contributes to and is affected by a broader cultural production of
futurity. By reading the social construction of financial derivatives along-
side more readily recognizable forms of speculative fiction, Migrant Futures
asks if another mode of speculation is possible, one that is not immediately
captured by the anxious gatherings of risk.12 If finance is, as Max Haiven
characterizes it, “capitalism’s imagination,” wherein neoliberal financiali-
zation “comes at the expense of the radical imagination,” I locate a primary
site of radical imagination in migrant futures that shift the site of emer-
gency away from terror toward deportation, attend to alternative pockets
of wonder such as feminist fabulation rather than defense strategy think
tanks, and speculate worlds that demand new onto-epistemological ways
of being and thinking.
Launching this examination are fundamental questions about who
narrates these futurities and what kinds of subject positions play out in
these projected temporal landscapes. Implicitly, the project interrogates
who stands to profit from and who risks extinction in prevailing narratives
4 - INTRODUCTION
about the future. The principal players in the derivatives markets are multi-
national corporations, international agencies such as the World Bank and
the Asian Development Bank, investment banks, and hedge funds that pool
the investments of wealthy clients—basically, everyone but individuals
and nations.13 The funds of the four largest U.S. participants—JPMorgan
Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs—represent more
than 30 percent of the total global derivatives market.14 Furthermore, the
fundamental governance of the global financial system has been dominated
entirely by U.S. and European economic interests, though countries with
clearly emerging market economies, such as China, India, and Brazil, have
demanded a seat at the rule-making table.15 The financial colonization of
the future builds on preexisting disparities of wealth held over from earlier
histories of empire and neocolonial enterprises that break at the fault line
between what has been called the Global North and South.
Meanwhile, mass migrations of the undocumented, unbanked, and
state-less workers move in and out of geopolitical spaces, the nuances and
histories of their displacement and precarity flattened by statistical aggre-
gation. They are migrant noncitizens, outliers, most of whom hail from
the Global South and have slipped beyond even “dividual” statistical legi-
bility.16 In the calculus of risk, the unmeasurable uncertainty of this statisti-
cal undercommons generates some friction, some disruption of the would-
be-unflappable promises of securitization. The economist Frank Knight,
in his interrogation of risk, distinguishes calculable probability (risk) from
the “absolute unpredictability of things” (true uncertainty).17 In the risk-
uncertainty dialectic, sheer uncertainty invites profit seekers to convert
profoundly unknowable states into probabilistic forecasts, to fold uncer-
tainty back into risk practices—yet uncertainty cuts loose from risk dis-
course’s capture, eluding containment and quantification. While true un-
certainty might refuse the grid of intelligibility that securitization would
foist upon it, it remains knowable as lived experience, felt and negotiated
perhaps most profoundly by those held in “the waiting-room of history.”
As he describes this imaginary waiting room in Provincializing Europe, Di-
pesh Chakrabarty suggests that the “modern, European idea of history. . .
came to non-European peoples in the 19th century as somebody’s way of
saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else.”18 In the context of finance capitalism,
though, the inhabitants of the waiting room are in fact being written out of
the future. What would it mean to reconfigure that marginalization from
European notions of progress, modernity, history, and futurity? What alter-
native futurities emerge from those living beyond the purview of statistical
projection?
If the abstraction of populations into calculated risks and algorithmic
approximations of lived experiences produces for state and international
regulatory institutions “a legible and administratively convenient for-
mat,”19 queer and trans theorists have been particularly helpful in thinking
through a politics that does not simply demand inclusion in that system. A
2015 special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, for example, takes aim
at the “imperative to be counted,” which becomes “another form of norma-
tivizing violence that trans subjects can encounter.”20 Census Bureau and
National Health Statistics data that feed U.S. biopolitical regimes of popu-
lation regulation work to regularize a population and “flatten its zoetic con-
fusions of movement and form, of time and space, of doing and being, into
neat two-dimensional axes specifying static properties and numbers.”21
Population regulation and public health discourse, insofar as they share
statistical methods with financial models of speculating on risk, could very
well move toward three-dimensional models using differential geometry
and statistical mechanics to predict volatility.22 But no matter how nuanced
and complex the models get, Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker’s provoca-
tion to consider how trans disrupts configurations of “statistical citizen-
ship” opens up a queering of speculation and perhaps even a queering of
statistical data as numerical or categorical, discrete or continuous, nominal
or ordinal.23 By “queering speculation,” I refer to a host of reconfigurations
of our relationships to the “financialization of daily life” and the manifesta-
tion of a “risk society”—which is to say a normative investment in quanti-
tative data to project futurity.24
When José Muñoz asserts that “the future is queerness’s domain,” he
posits a horizon of potentiality. Though that horizon might invoke Martin
Heidegger’s Being and Time and therefore asks us to contend with Heideg-
ger’s Nazism, Muñoz’s articulation of a not yet draws more compellingly
not only on Giorgio Agamben’s formulation but also on Ernst Bloch’s theo-
rization of indeterminacy. Muñoz’s presentation of the not yet of queer
futurity suggests a way to seize the not yet of European historicity as de-
scribed in Chakrabarty’s waiting-room scenario. In Muñoz’s words, “we
are left waiting but vigilant in our desire for another time that is not yet
here.” Queer futurity offers a model for transforming the waiting room
into a horizon. As it moves through examples of queer art, performance,
and other queer utopian expressions, Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia looks to the
6 - INTRODUCTION
realm of the open-ended gesture as an alternative to the way other forms
of s peculation attempt to pull that horizon of the future into the present
for profit.25
By enjambing these two formulations of the not yet—one that seeks
to illuminate histories of empire and exclusion, and another that insists
on futurity as an opening up rather than a closing down—I want to con-
sider the relationship between the waiting room and the horizon. For it is
precisely in the exile’s relation to time—the point at which one is pushed
out of what could be called straight time, settler time, or the profitable
time of compound interest—that one can glimpse the horizon of the not
yet, where not yet manifests itself not as a decree of foreclosure but as an
embrace of the unknown. Building on the work of C. L. R. James, Muñoz
writes: “To call for this notion of the future in the present is to summon a
refunctioned notion of utopia in the service of subaltern politics.”26
If speculation is indeed our zeitgeist, how can we imagine the future
otherwise? In the face of a seemingly monolithic financialized future, as
conceived by investment banks and international development funds, this
book looks to speculative fictions that highlight the displacements and vio-
lences of global finance capitalism. Migrant Futures sets out to think specu-
lation from below and highlights alternative engagements with futurity
emerging from the colonized, displaced, and disavowed. Through close
analyses of speculative fiction, film, and graphic narrative, I examine how
the genre’s emergent cultural producers usurp conventional science fiction
tropes of abduction, alienation, and teleportation and recast them against
the backdrop of slavery, histories of forced migration, and deportation. By
excavating forgotten histories of science and empire, revising conceptual-
izations of technological subjectivities, and seeking out queer affinities that
belie privatized futures, these works demonstrate how speculation can take
the shape of radical unfurling, rather than protectionist anticipation. In-
stead of using predictive calculations that perpetually attempt to pull the
future into the present, these alternative speculative fictions, films, and
other media forms work to release speculation from capitalism’s persistent
instrumentalization of futurity. I hold up these works of speculative fiction
by people of color not as antidotes in and of themselves to racialized global
capitalism but as affecting experiments that, in the process of imagining
another way of being in time, point to the limitations of the new world
order’s ongoing drive toward modes of privatization and securitization.
I focus my analysis on close readings of cultural texts from the 1990s on,
written from contexts that challenge categories of national literatures and
yet coalesce around critiques of global capitalism. These texts play across
various geographies of colonialism (Latin America, the Caribbean, South
and Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and Africa), and they share
an impulse to complicate Eurocentric ideas about the universal subject,
modernity, science, and history. Together, they facilitate temporal and
spatial disorientations that intervene in a neoliberal fantasy of a seamless
world unified under the sign of global capitalism for the global (financial)
citizen.
More specifically, I look to the genre of speculative fiction, wherein cul-
tural producers from the global financial undercommons have refused to
relinquish the terrain of imagined futures.27 These migrant futures serve
as theoretical models through which to reconfigure speculation as a mo-
dality more fundamentally rooted in inconclusive reflection; tidy resolu-
tion is not its ultimate goal. Rather, the term “speculation” carries with it a
sense of lingering conjecture and registers hypothesis as beyond so-called
fact. Speculative fiction is a genre of inventing other possibilities (alternate
realities, upside-down hierarchies, and supernatural interventions). Specu-
lation is not exclusively interested in predicting the future but is equally
compelled to explore different accounts of history. It calls for a disruption
of teleological ordering of the past, present, and future and foregrounds
the processes of narrating the past (history) and the future (science). While
speculation embraces an ethic of meticulous inquiry, it shifts the empha-
sis of scientific pursuit from fact-chasing to experiment-reveling. Specula-
tion calls into question the genre-making practices of science fiction and
interrogates the hierarchical and gendered relationship between hard and
soft science fiction. The term “speculation” has also been helpful in that it
obliquely and bleakly resonates with the discourse of venture capitalism. It
tethers financial speculation to other forms of capitalist expansion, includ-
ing land acquisition and purchasing on the margin.
The works of literature, film, and graphic narrative collected herein
could be called Afrofuturist, Chican@futurist, or Asian futurist, but as
they all highlight modes of exchange that move beyond national cultural
traditions, they might better be brought into a rubric of “migrant futures.”
Taken together, these migrant futures configure a transnational counter-
poetics to the predatory speculations of global capitalism.28 On the one
hand, “migrant futures” refers in this case to the ways futures markets have
moved from place to place and built on the momentum of earlier forms
8 - INTRODUCTION
of capitalist incentivization, such as civilizing missions and the rhetorics
of development. On the other hand, this book investigates narratives of
futurity alternatively fabulated by transnational speculative fiction authors
who challenge neoliberal ideas of freewheeling global entrepreneurialism.
Projections of futurity abound, each preoccupied with fears of oncoming
deterioration, disaster, or accident. Some invite us to buy into these futures
markets, placing bets on which will return the best dividends; others imag-
ine things differently.
Decolonizing Futurity
At the outset of the twenty-first century, two momentous collections of
science fiction sought to illuminate and show evidence of a long-standing
tradition of speculative writing by black writers. Edited by Sheree Thomas,
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000)
and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004) establish a rich collection of
black speculative writing, reaching back to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1929 short
story “The Comet.” Another anthology titled So Long Been Dreaming: Post-
colonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004), edited by Nalo Hopkinson and
Uppinder Mehan, similarly broadened notions of a genre often associated
primarily with white male writers from the United States and Europe.
Furthermore, the Dark Matter anthologies and So Long Been Dreaming en-
gage in a theoretical discussion about race and science fiction. In addition
to featuring various short stories and excerpts of fiction, Thomas’s collec-
tions include several critical essays by esteemed writers such as Samuel R.
Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Walter Mosley, who seek to complicate and
expand notions of what constitutes and defines the genre of science fic-
tion. In the introduction to So Long Been Dreaming, Hopkinson describes
postcolonial speculative fiction as “stories that take the meme of colonizing
the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert
it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humour, and also, with love
and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think
about new ways of doing things.”29 Mentored by Samuel Delany through
the Clarion Writers Workshop, Hopkinson both carries on a tradition of
black speculative writing and urges a more transnational consideration of
science fiction writing among diasporic peoples. Hopkinson’s powerful
statement begins to lay out some of the stakes of postcolonial science fic-
tion: How useful can the genre of science fiction be as a critical tool in the
hands of authors for whom “Science” has not historically been particularly
kind? How might science fiction writers use this genre as the very occasion
for interrogating a history of scientific racism, the collaboration of scien-
tific institutions and the building of empires, and the disciplining of aber-
rant bodies under the rubric of “progress”?
Progress narratives, conceptualizations of modernity, and empiricist im-
peratives break across varied histories of imperialism, slavery, settler colo-
nialism, and scenes of forced displacement from military and neocolonial
incursions. Afro futurism and Chican@ futurism might have some similar
stakes in writing black and brown bodies into the future, but they do so
against different forms of racist primitivism. Asian futurism can be trickier
to fabulate, given science fiction’s persistent fascination with techno-
Orientalist themes and landscapes. When it comes to futurity, it’s not so
much that Asians have been written out of it. We’ve become the sign of it,
the backdrop to it, and the style manual for it.30 As some scholars of moder-
nity and postmodernity have demonstrated, modernity and—we can ex-
trapolate here—futurity get mobilized and experienced differently across
global contexts, in part because of the varied ways racial difference gets
mapped onto colonial projections of elsewhere as well as onto neoliberal
fantasies of one world. What might a more comparativist approach to de-
colonizing futurity reveal about some of the consistencies across futurity’s
omissions? Migrant Futures takes up this minoritarian sector of a genre as a
counterpoint to other forms of speculation—specifically, a financial specu-
lation assumptive of a naturalized empiricism and universal financial sub-
ject, which may pretend not to care about race but that nonetheless traffics
across histories of racialized capitalism.
The emergence of these anthologies at the outset of the twenty-first
century provides an occasion for examining how science and the fictions
of science participate in the construction of national and international
ideas about modernity and futurity. How are these narratives about sci-
ence, modernity, and futurity intertwined with how we think about race,
gender, and sexuality? Given the long and complicated relationship be-
tween science and empire, what critical considerations and contributions
does postcolonial speculation offer the genre of science fiction and scien-
tific disciplines? The critique levied by these postcolonial speculative fic-
tion writers examines some common science fiction tropes—an emphasis
on exploration, the settlement of new lands, potential alien invasions, and
technological advancement that emerges from and characterizes the First
10 - I N T R O D U C T I O N
World—and questions to what extent the genre itself reproduces the social
and political ideologies of a system of science that has historically operated
in close conjunction with imperialist and neocolonial enterprises.
One of the most prominent themes of postcolonial speculative fiction
is the revision of Western origin myths of technoscience to encourage a
radical shift in the epistemological assumptions of scientific endeavors. In
other words, one of the fictions about science that these writers contest is
that because of the Enlightenment, Europe has an exclusive claim to sci-
ence’s origins. At stake in this debate is that, as David Harvey has argued,
“Enlightenment thought . . . embraced the idea of progress, and actively
sought that break with history and tradition which modernity espouses.”31
Pursuing alternative technocultural origin myths also means rejecting the
progress narratives that Enlightenment thought encourages. In my analy-
sis of postcolonial speculative fiction, I foreground the critique of progress
narratives that makes this emergent set of science fiction writing so vital a
countersite for development models of capitalism.
The colonization of the future works to justify and rationalize imperial-
ist expansionism by mobilizing ideological narratives that characterize its
predation as a civilizing mission. In the case of finance capitalism, statisti-
cal projection transforms the untenable future into a futurescape—akin to
the transformation of land into landscape—that materializes the abstract,
rendering it available for possession, even as a sight to behold, or an imagi-
nary to occupy. Art historians and indigenous studies scholars call such
manifestations of the imaginary into the real the “visual regimes of coloni-
zation,” with the idea that to aestheticize a landscape is to lay claim to it as
if creating “portraits of property.”32
Sixteenth-century cartographers drew dragons at the end of the known
world on their maps. They used magic and the fantastic to mark where
uncertainty lay in waiting.33 Mary Louise Pratt demonstrated in Imperial
Eyes how empire’s “mapping of progress” manifested itself in European im-
perialist cartography and travel writing, alongside European economic and
political expansion since 1700.34 Pratt’s work needs to be read in conjunc-
tion with Ian Hacking’s history of probability theory in the largely overlap-
ping period of the seventeenth to late-nineteenth centuries as part of the
history of speculation. If the literary and cartographic speculations of Im-
perial Eyes emerge alongside Hacking’s historical mapping of the probabi-
listic “taming of chance,”35 these concomitant proliferations of speculative
fictions and financial speculation suggest a prehistory for the contempo-
rary convergence of speculative practices in world markets and global cul-
tural imaginaries. I turn to the future as a temporal geography, as a con-
temporary extension of how temporality gets narrativized in the service
of imperial conquest, from the fantastical maps that facilitated the settler
colonial conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth through seventeenth
centuries through eighteenth- and nineteenth- century EuroAmerican
representations of a racialized and gendered evolutionary family Tree of
Man.36 Thriving on the calculation and redistribution of projected risk and
volatility, the derivatives markets work “to colonize the future,”37 wherein
the future becomes terra nullius, emptied of its true uncertainty, filled with
securitized risk, and sanctified by a positivist accounting of projection.
Critical inquiry into speculation demands not only a study of genre but
also a critique of an ideology. The gambit of Migrant Futures is to examine
futurity from the perspective of the dragons at the edge of the map.
Toward an Antipositivist Science Fiction

The future is an always already occupied space. Though often idealized
as blank and empty, primed for projection and population, the future is
in practice never so fixed or consolidated, though financial instruments
work precisely toward actualizing the future in order to monetize and
profit from it. The future exists as absolute uncertainty, which capitalism
attempts to contain through the calculation of risk, but ultimately can-
not foreclose entirely. Indeed, with the faltering beginning in 2007–8 of
an ever-flexible system of speculative capital, the bubble of the subprime
mortgage crisis popping, and the failure to predict and protect against the
2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that caused the meltdown of three
reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the early twenty-
first century seems a particularly interesting time to be theorizing specula-
tion. We have recently witnessed the ramifications of the betrayed promises
of speculative capital in the form of empty returns on financial derivatives,
the collapse of the hedge fund promise, and the disastrous impact on low-
income homeowners of a credit bubble bursting.
Simultaneously filled with corporate fantasies of limitless profit and
leftist antihierarchical possibilities, the future—or, rather, the endless
multiplicity of futures—can never be fully colonized. Even as the specula-
tive fictions highlighted in Migrant Futures fabulate anti-racist, queer cri-
tiques of global capitalism, financial speculation similarly invests in con-
verting possible futures into calculated risk. When used to orient subjects
toward normativity, the future offers seemingly flexible but always narrow
projections of improvement. Capitalism, after all, is interested in norma-
tivity only to the extent that it produces insecurity and consumerist desire.
Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism conjures a spectacularly absorptive foe, a
blob capitalism indiscriminately folding would-be outliers into its ever-
expanding domain. If it is to remain a space of possibility, the future must
always also be a multiply occupied space.
Migrant Futures concerns itself with speculative fiction. By using this
term instead of the genre’s more commonly used moniker of “science fic-
tion,” I invoke a decades-long debate about a literary genre’s relationship
to a form of knowledge production called science. For the science fiction
theorist Darko Suvin, science fiction is a genre delimited by works “whose
main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s
empirical environment.”38 The genre produces, for Suvin, a useful tension
between estrangement (a departure from realism) and cognition (the pos-
sibility that the world described could be real, as opposed to myth and
fantasy). Suvin’s theorization of cognitive estrangement has long served
the field of science fiction studies as the definitive account of what distin-
guishes science fiction from other genres, and it operates firmly on the uni-
versalist assumptions of an “empirical environment” and the presumption
of a universally agreed upon “estrangement” (or for that matter, “realism”).
But strangeness and familiarity both remain inherently attached to situ-
ated, subjective experiences. Suvin’s definition of science fiction through
this formulation of cognitive estrangement has always sought to nail down,
pinpoint, and close off the boundaries of a genre in ways I have always
found rather limiting. For this reason, I have generally preferred more ca-
pacious terms that are less interested in literary taxonomies than in the
various modalities of writing and reading that can alter relations between
writer and reader, shift ways of thinking, and produce different kinds of
subjects. I take up the term “speculative fiction” not to identify a genre
wholly distinct from science fiction, but to use a more expansive term that
might include related genres such as fantasy, horror, and historical fiction;
and that highlights the speculative mode of the “What if?”
Some works of science fiction bear an aspirational fidelity to the trend-
ing ideals of scientists, but science, like futurity, is contested terrain, con-
sisting of varying arenas of scientific production and publication situated
in specific historical contexts and political economies. Nevertheless, many
science fiction scholars have often adhered to a “one world” idealization of
science that performs a degree of globalizing visioning itself. For example,
in his discussion of “hard” science fiction, Gregory Benford works to align
science fiction writers and scientists by pointing to a shared “internation-
alist idealism” and engagement in the “free trading of ideas.”39 Benford
writes of a free trade idealism that could well describe global economic
neoliberalism. Published in 1994 in an anthology titled The Ascent of Won-
der: The Evolution of Hard sf, Benford’s essay laments (“Alas!”) the genre’s
yielding to “the old styles,” in which “scientific accuracy and worldview
are subordinate to conventional literary virtues of character or plot, style
or setting.” In his valuation of internationalist idealism and the scientific
worldview, Benford reveals the global scale of his aspirations for the futures
of both science and science fiction. His privileging of “hard sf” over “old,”
“soft” forms of science fiction—beyond invoking a rather gendered set of
criteria—suits the narrative arc of a genre’s “evolution” set forth by the an-
thology’s subtitle.
In this matter of narrating the evolution of science fiction, though, Ben-
ford bumps up against the genre’s own preoccupation with novelty. Ben-
ford’s “old” forms actually refer to the “New Wave” of U.S. speculative fic-
tion that emerges throughout the 1960s and 70s, a period when increasing
numbers of women, queers, and people of color took to writing in and
around the genre.40 By calling the New Wave “old” and mapping a rubric
of “evolution” onto his genealogy of the genre, Benford participates in the
social reproduction of science fiction as the exclusive privilege of white
men.41
Though Benford sets out to advocate for a vigorously collaborative ap-
proach to knowledge production that models itself on research published
in scientific journals that might have fifty authors’ names attached to the
article, the model has some flaws, as the sciences continue to present a
pool of thinkers with rather homogeneous profiles. In addition, Benford’s
language gives away some of his preconceived valuations of worth. In his
praise of communally developed ideas, he lauds the “family” feeling of col-
laborative research and points to the “fidelity” of facts definitional to the
“hardness” of fiction.42 In repeatedly referring to “faithfulness to the physi-
cal facts of the universe,” Benford conjures a heteronormative marriage be-
tween science and science fiction, and he mobilizes a decidedly patriarchal
rhetoric, evoking not only gendered allocations of value (“hard” not “soft”)
but also eugenicist language (the “simon-pure breed” of “physical science”
over the social sciences) to perform his generic gatekeeping.43 This nor-
mative policing of what deserves the designation “science fiction” seems
ill-conceived for a genre ostensibly interested in pushing the boundaries
of the possible.
Understanding the production of scientific knowledge, as with other
forms of knowledge production, requires critical attention to the condi-
tions and contexts that shape these knowledges. Following the work of
Donna Haraway, I approach the sciences as “specific historical and cul-
ture productions” and consider them “radically contingent” upon the situa-
tions that give rise to them.44 Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, for example,
not only calls forth a feminist epistemology, but also situates the need for
a radical revision of technoscientific origin myths in the political context
of science-based industries that capitalize on the exploitation of a trans-
national female labor force.45 Haraway also famously looks to feminist
works of science fiction as cultural contestations of what she calls “the god
trick.”46 Advocating for the production of “situated knowledges” and nar-
ratives with multiple meanings, Haraway sees in science fiction a site for
unmooring scientific knowledge production from a pursuit of mastery or
claims to perfect objectivity.47
In her investigation of the history of scientific autonomy, Nancy Leys
Stepan questions how claims to scientific authority became, in the nine-
teenth century, “increasingly conceptualised as ‘a sharply-edged, value-
neutral, a-political, non-theological, empirical and objective form of knowl-
edge unlike any other’” through a relentless process of “boundary-setting
between science and non-science.”48 Stepan argues that science emerged
from this proliferation of dichotomies as a distinct form of knowledge pro-
duction that positioned itself as “pure,” “rational,” “objective,” “hard,” and
“male.” The writer and theorist Samuel Delany argues that a concomitant
positivism during the “precritical period in sf when scientism dominates
the field” imagines that “all the difficulties of the world are presented as
amenable to scientific solution.”49
Rather than policing genre borders of what counts and what does not
count as science fiction, I attend to the imaginative work this specula-
tive mode, which engages a specific relationship to futurity, does on what
kinds of knowledges we produce. For Haraway, “sf” includes “Science Fic-
tion, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far”—practices that model
worldings that redo “what counts as—what is—real.”50 For Delany, specu-
lative fiction exemplifies “paraliterature,” which names those forms of
writing—“comic books, mysteries, westerns, science fiction, pornography,
greeting card verse, newspaper reports, academic criticism, advertising
texts, movie and tv scripts, popular song lyrics”—deemed extrinsic to but
therefore also dialectically constitutive of “literature.”51 As a paraliterary
form, speculative fiction virally occupies the structural site of “proper” fic-
tion. So, rather than a “genre,” which Derrida understood as an announce-
ment of normative delineations that does not “risk impurity, anomaly, or
monstrosity,”52 speculation harbors a promiscuous impulse.
Though this promiscuity and disregard for the proper may be what
makes speculation such a formidable instrument of capitalist appetite—it
is not unlike Fisher’s blobular capitalism, after all—it is also what makes
speculative fiction such a well-matched alternative to capitalist realism.
For the future is on the move, and though finance capitalism attempts to
monopolize it through speculative instruments that render it a profitable
space, the future remains profoundly unknowable and unpredictable. If the
financial, actuarial, and statistical seek to produce predictive models sold
to economic markets as scientific, perhaps this is precisely the moment
to reassert Delany’s provocation that “fiction makes models of reality.”53
In one of his earliest essays on speculative fiction, co-written with Mari-
lyn Hacker, Delany takes up mathematical modeling as a counterpoint
to speculative fiction. He writes: “As soon as we want to look at ‘the real
world’ with any greater accuracy and sophistication . . . other models than
the arithmetically predictable are more useful to help us appreciate what
we are looking at.”54 “On Speculative Fiction,” by Delany and Hacker, ap-
pears as an introduction to the fourth volume of Quark: A Quarterly Review
of Science Fiction, published in 1971, at the dawn of the global financial sys-
tem—when capitalism in the United States and European contexts had to
restructure itself vis-à-vis the emerging markets of the “Asian tigers.” The
result, of course, was the rise of the financial derivatives markets and the
proliferation of futures contracts.55 As LiPuma and Lee note, “in 1970 the
yearly valuation of financial derivatives . . . was probably only a few million
dollars. The sum swelled to about $100 million by 1980, to nearly $100 bil-
lion by 1990, and to nearly $100 trillion by 2000.”56 Writing at the onset
of this rapid ascent of finance capitalism, Delany was already calling for an
alternative approach to imagining futures. More specifically, he was calling
for a mode of speculation that moved beyond the “incantatory function—
a better word than ‘predictive.’”57 Delany was after an antipositivist science
fiction. He was theorizing a speculative fiction wherein “the impossible re-
lieves the probable, and the possible illuminates the improbable.”58 It is this
striking move from the instrumentalization of probability to the unbound-
edness of possibility that this book posits as a response to the “corrosion of
social imagination” that so preoccupied Fisher.59
Temporal Geographies of the Speculative Undercommons

The texts I examine herein posit critiques and alternatives to the specula-
tions of globalization and interject radical revisions of progress narratives
by attending to the markedly uneven accumulation of wealth of late capital-
ism. These counterspeculations tend to refuse strictly utopian or dystopian
trajectories for technoculture, and they attempt to intervene in develop-
mental teleologies by denaturalizing linear arrangements of time. These
speculative fictions enact what Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd have called “the
excavation and connection of alternative histories and their different tem-
poralities that cannot be contained by the progressive narrative of Western
developmentalism.”60 In the recent years of rampant speculation, late capi-
talism has insistently faced forward, driving Walter Benjamin’s Angel of
History along, if not attempting to push it aside. When speculative futures
run wild, excavation, historicization, and haunting become increasingly
important modes of contingency to slow the storm of progress.61
The speculative fictions that I discuss come from a wide range of geo-
graphical contexts, each the site of some form of U.S. imperialism. Under
the rubric of speculative fiction, various historical networks of affiliations
(among Asian immigrants to the Caribbean and Mexico, Malaysian workers
in Singapore, and Asian Brazilians who migrate for a second time to South-
ern California) are evoked that decenter the United States in the narra-
tive of immigration to the Americas. The authors I examine posit the geo-
graphical loci of the Brazilian Amazon, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and
the Southeast Asian archipelago as speculative spaces, wherein histories of
colonization and labor exploitation have produced markedly different re-
lationships to Western science and technology. My project, therefore, sug-
gests that these speculative fictions forge transnational affiliations by posit-
ing diasporic movement as a technology that works covalently with other
intensified global flows. Migrant Futures considers speculative fictions that
create transnational affiliations among communities of color that extend
networks of care beyond national narratives of “risky subjects” and the cal-
culations of global financialization.62
I write at a moment when Asian Americanists and queer theorists alike
have witnessed neoliberalism’s all-too-easy co-optation of rights-based
advocacy work. Queer theorists have named a homonormativity, homo-
nationalism, and queer liberalism that point to the limitations of social
movements for legal recognition, one that ultimately locks the struggle
into a juridical framework that demands the production of a fixed subject,
tethered to the nation as its citizen.63 A similar dissatisfaction has emerged
among Asian Americanists who not only continue to grapple with the in-
adequacy of a term that attempts to span an unwieldy range of disparate
economic living and working conditions as well as diverse histories of mi-
gration and cultural negotiations but also grow impatient with the false
prophecies of multicultural triumphalism, model minority achievements
and beneficent refuge.64
Given these frustrations with neoliberal pluralism, it is heartening that
the search for sociopolitical alternatives, or the will to “imagine otherwise”
is still on, especially via a “critique of subjectification rather than the desire
for subjectivity.”65 In her formulation of “subjectlessness, as a conceptual
tool, [which] points to the need to manufacture ‘Asian American’ situation-
ally,”66 Kandice Chuh discusses Lowe’s demonstration in Immigrant Acts of
how the nation-state advances Enlightenment liberalism’s promises of citi-
zenship as key to freedom even as capitalism requires differentiation and
uneven distributions of power. Chuh indicates the limitations of rights-
based advocacy that is already orienting the battle toward a notion of the
liberal citizen-subject who might find herself knee-deep in multicultural-
ism but still without much in the way of justice or equity.67 Chuh’s call for
a redefinition of the political involves a departure from a nation-framed
politics of inclusion and the positivism of identity politics. Calling critical
attention to the rights-bearing subject as one tethered to Enlightenment
ideals of citizenship and notions of universal subjectivity that emerged
from a historically specific moment when slavery and other institutions ex-
cluded many from the category of the human, practitioners of queer theory
and ethnic studies have pointed to the limitations of a politics that seeks
recognition from a system fundamentally bound to prerequisties of nor-
mative belonging.68
Queer critiques, in particular, offer alternatives to the developmental
and aspirational drives ascribed to heteronormative life courses. “Queer
subcultures,” writes Jack Halberstam, “produce alternative temporalities
by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined
according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life ex-
perience—namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”69 One of the
reasons Halberstam looks to Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
is to illustrate how “queers use space and time in ways that challenge con-
ventional logics of development, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility.”70
Rather than seeing “no future” in systems driven by the clock time of sexual
and social reproduction,71 Halberstam—along with Elizabeth Freeman, for
starters—limns the political potentiality of queer failure, refusal, recalci-
trance, withholding, and other techniques of disrupting what Benjamin
calls “homogeneous empty time.”72 As “denizens of times out of joint,”
queers unsettle the temporal ordering practices of “chrononormativity.”73
Freeman’s attention to the ways laboring bodies in the industrial era
are “bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regu-
lation” and tempered into normative rhythms of work and productivity di-
rects us to consider the pivotal role temporality plays in producing modern
subjectivities and marching out the tempo of modernity itself. The aspira-
tional “chronobiopolitics” (to borrow Dana Luciano’s term)74 of neoliberal
futurity capitalizes on subjective orientations toward flexible temporalities
(such as the use of “flex time” to obscure the increased number of over-
time hours) and perpetual self-improvement (with achievement badges for
every stage of endlessly upgradeable life). Lauren Berlant’s notion of the
impasse seems particularly apt as a refusal of this relentlessly anticipatory
trajectory of time.75
In the chapters that follow, I emphasize the continuity across finance
speculation’s harnessing of futurity and an older imperialist practice of
leveraging white supremacist notions of modernity toward the same end
of extracting profit. I draw on the work of historians of science and tech-
nology who trace how technoscience—from its material inventions to its
ideological disseminations—has aided and abetted (and sought to ratio-
nalize) colonizing forces in the conquest, subjugation, and/or exploitation
of other peoples.76 At the same time, rather than approaching science as
a hegemonic force, my readings of speculative fictions emphasize the re-
ciprocal, dialectical relationships in technocultural formation. I investigate
how speculative fiction helps shift the conventional framework of “tech-
nology” to consider other types of knowledge-networks that cut across
center-periphery models of scientific production. My attention to a more
inclusive account of scientific practice is motivated by an effort to recog-
nize the often invisible labor that supports scientific enterprises and dis-
covery claims. From the explorer’s indigenous translator to the factory
worker who assembles laboratory instruments, the production of scientific
knowledge has been contingent upon a labor force that takes a much more
central role in the speculative fictions I analyze in this project. Labor be-
comes more visible in these narratives as part of more cooperative models
of intellectual, and material, production that emphasize cross-class, inter-
ethnic collaborations and transnational circulations of knowledge. I argue
that speculative fiction can foster alternative forms of connectivity that
exceed and defy the privatizing logics of nation, corporation, and nuclear
family. The fictions I examine formulate innovative structures of belonging
and possible coalition building across conventional differences that emerge
from alternative genealogies of speculative fiction, including 1960s Latin
American magical realism, Caribbean carnival, Afro futurism, manga,
anime, Chinese folklore, and rasquachismo. These paraliterary genealo-
gies call our attention to the significance of imaginative literary forms that
arise out of paracapitalist contexts and therefore might provide even more
grounds for imagining the world beyond capitalist realism.
In the first chapter of this book, “Imperial Rubber: The Speculative Arcs
of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Rainforest Futures,” I examine the work of Yama-
shita, a Japanese American writer whose speculative fiction Through the
Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) exhumes the traces of multiple empires that
have shaped contemporary transpacific circulations of labor and culture.
Set in the Amazon jungle, the novel unearths U.S. neocolonial enterprises
in Brazil by excavating the ruins of Fordlándia, a Ford rubber plantation
cultivated in the 1920s and abandoned in the 1930s. By analyzing archival
material on Fordlándia alongside Yamashita’s text, I situate the civilizing
mission Henry Ford used to rationalize his plantation building within the
longer history of nineteenth-century European imperialist discourses on
tropical nature, health, and race, which sustained ethnographic and scien-
tific expeditions to the Amazon. If both financial speculation and specu-
lative fiction draw on at least the recent past, what are their extrapolation
points? If those points of departure shift, or if authors of the future look
to alternative historical flash points, how might their projections change?
Chapter 1 extrapolates from the historical narrative of Fordist ruin and fail-
ure rather than Fordist triumphalism to inquire what might have happened
if the fortune of global capitalism had foretold ecological disaster rather
than only spectacular profit. By understanding Yamashita’s Through the Arc
of the Rain Forest as a dystopian tale of flexible citizenship and neoliberal
20 - INTRODUCTION
economic policy, I foreground how global finance capitalism provides only
a partial utopian perspective of what such globalizing moves will unleash.
The second chapter, “Homeland Futurity: Speculations at the Border,”
examines the U.S.-Mexico border as a site of historical and ongoing specu-
lation. Frontiers and borders—whether imagined by Frederick Jackson
Turner in the late nineteenth century as unruly wilderness demanding
containment and civilization or reimagined a century later by Gloria An-
zaldúa as spaces of mythical transformation—have perpetually been called
into being through fantastic speculation. As decades of scholarship in Latin
American and Latinx literary studies show, the production of borders in-
volves a practice of worlding, of fabulations of time and space.77 Amid dis-
cussions of surveillance technologies, the War on Drugs, the War on Ter-
ror, and anti-immigration campaigns, I analyze late twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century examples of critical speculations that renegotiate bor-
der futures by contesting the strategies of risk management and contain-
ment that fill the Homeland Security imaginary. Yamashita’s novel Tropic
of Orange and Alex Rivera’s independent film Sleep Dealer provide helpful
counternarratives to more predatory forms of speculation by producing the
possibilities of cross-border coalitions that disrupt the corporatization and
militarization of the Southland, a region that always also shares a border
with the Pacific Ocean.
Carrying through the project’s critique of speculation in the service
of securitization and surveillance states, chapter 3, “Speculation and the
Speculum: Surrogations of Futurity” turns to another important field of
imagining futurity: reproduction. In my consideration of Alfonso Cuarón’s
film Children of Men and Nalo Hopkinson’s science fiction Midnight Rob-
ber, I examine two speculative narratives that foreground black pregnant
women as bearers of a new tomorrow while overturning techno-utopian
visions of progress. Though a radical revision of P. D. James’s 1992 national-
ist novel of the same name, Cuarón’s Children of Men ultimately disappoints
because it imposes a gendered and racialized reproductive imperative onto
the pregnant body of Kee, the “fugee” woman who must navigate her way
through the heavily surveilled police state of near-future England, with lim-
ited awareness of how this reproduces the kind of necropolitical violence
the film sets out to expose. While the protagonist Theo tries to get Kee to
a boat called The Tomorrow, the film reinstates the promise of the white
savior, even as they pass through a dystopian futurescape through which
Cuarón launches an unequivocal critique of the War on Terror, carceral
states, and securitization measures. Midnight Robber articulates the condi-
tions of survival in end-of-the-world scenarios quite differently. Hopkin-
son emphasizes cross-species alliances and gender-queer family forma-
tions that dislodge futurity from models of heteropatriarchal reproduction.
The fourth chapter, “The Cruel Optimism of the Asian Century,” leaps
across oceans to focus on Singapore and its self-conscious marketing as a
place of optimism about the future. The chapter questions Singapore’s opti-
mism by examining Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot, a graphic story collection
by a Malaysian-born Singaporean writer-artist, in which the protagonists
eke out an existence in a dystopic, near-future, pan-Asian city where the
future’s promises have clearly passed them over and instead left them with
ramshackle shelters to inhabit and mutant life forms with which to com-
miserate. These graphic narratives about street urchins trying to survive in
a foreboding landscape interrogate what it is like to live amid the towering
edifices of futurity without the means to make a home. Malinky Robot also
opens onto questions about life in the Capitalocene, where humanistic as-
pirational subjectivity has only sustained what Berlant calls a “cruel opti-
mism.”78 Finally, as two of the main characters are nonhumans, surrounded
by humans who inexplicably accept the dehumanizing conditions to which
they are subjected in their everyday lives, Malinky Robot provides an occa-
sion to think futurity beyond the human. This query about multi-species
futures is a thread that continues more intentionally in chapter 5, in which
a feminist-queer commons emerges as one response to the individualist
structures of capitalist subjectivity.
That final chapter, “Salt Fish Futures: The Irradiated Transpacific and
the Financialization of the Human Genome Project,” turns to Larissa Lai’s
Salt Fish Girl, an Asian-Canadian speculative fiction set in a near-future
where corporate enclosures have replaced international cities, genetically
modified organisms proliferate both within and beyond zones of regula-
tion, and the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness enlists immigrants in tele-
marketing schemes securing investors in offshore business ventures. Living
in this world shaped by predatory speculation, Lai’s protagonists never-
theless experiment with unpredictable ways to foment collective dissent
across species, spaces, and temporalities. I read Salt Fish Girl as one ex-
ample of radical speculation that explores histories of transnational migra-
tion and nuclear holocaust, transgenic mutations and transcultural mem-
ory, as well as queer sex and anticapitalist forms of exchange to articulate
a strange futurity that disrupts the smooth surfaces of techno-Orientalism.
22 - INTRODUCTION
Speculating from the margins, the migrant futures explored herein offer
alternative approaches to futurity. Yamashita’s exhumations of failed plan-
tation futures in the Brazilian Amazon stage the disintegration of capi-
talism’s gleaming promises in the form of a new resource with seemingly
limitless potential that ultimately proves to be structurally flawed. In Tropic
of Orange and Sleep Dealer, the elusiveness of the horizon and the cross-
ethnic solidarity across fugitive networks sustain a mode of looking to the
future without hoping to contain it. In Malinky Robot, the children of the
future take truant paths through makeshift geographies to eke out a life in
the shadow of an Asian Century. Finally, Salt Fish Girl formulates a trans-
genic commons that intervenes in the privatization of the future. Taken
together, these speculative acts model a cultural politics of decolonizing
futurity, of occupying the not yet, to hold it open for the yet to come.
1
I M P E R I A L R U B B E R The Speculative Arcs

of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Rainforest Futures
I will outnumber you.

I will outbillion you.
I am the spectacle in the forest.
I am the inventor of rubber.
I will outrubber you.
Sir, the reality of your world is nothing more
than a rotten caricature of great opera.
—W E R N E R H E R Z O G , Fitzcarraldo
In Werner Herzog’s 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo, the eponymous protagonist

dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
His impossible dream is realized by staging an opera aboard the steamship
he originally commissioned for the purpose of securing a fortune in rub-
ber. Fitzcarraldo, using the suspiciously volunteered labor of hundreds of
Indians, succeeds in dragging his ship over a mountain to gain access to
untapped rubber trees, only to have his boat cut loose and set adrift into
perilous rapids by the same indigenous workers on the other side.1
The “discovery” of rubber proclaimed by French geographer Charles-
Marie de La Condamine in the mid-eighteenth century occasions one early
manifestation of what could be called science fiction, in the sense that
his expedition journal—later published as a scientific treatise—reads as a
rather fantastical travel narrative. As elucidated in Mary Louise Pratt’s Im-
perial Eyes, La Condamine’s report on his expedition to the Amazon is strik-
ingly speculative in nature, “written mainly not as a scientific report, but
in the popular genre of survival literature.”2 Rubber is just one spectacular
character among many in La Condamine’s narrative, which describes the
strangeness of a tropical “new world”3 and even attempts to verify the exis-
tence of the mythic Amazon women warriors. As it narrates an encounter
with an otherworldly landscape, populated with alien (to the French scien-
tist) flora, fauna, and other entities, La Condamine’s account of his scien-
tific expedition reads like speculative fiction, particularly because it is pro-
duced in the service of empire both to sensationalize and rationalize—or
to rationalize through sensational fantasy—the possible wealth to be con-
trolled and wildness to be domesticated in the Brazilian jungle.
The history of the rubber industry necessarily stretches across multiple
geographies and temporalities. It links the tropical forests of the Amazon
and Southeast Asia, highlighting the competing imperial holdings of Eng
land, the Netherlands, and the United States. This history also connects
La Condamine’s 1744 expedition with that of Carl LaRue, a Ford Motor
Company geographer, in 1927—the year Henry Ford bought approximately
2.5 million acres of Amazon rainforest in the northern state of Pará, Bra-
zil, and established a sizable rubber plantation.4 “Fordlándia” was designed
to be an all-inclusive neocolonial system, extending the plantation infra-
structure beyond sawmills and processing plants to include U.S.-style hos-
pitals, schools, white clapboard houses, and even recreational facilities
such as a motion-picture theater and an eighteen-hole golf course. As docu-
mented in the company’s archives, the Ford rubber plantations in Brazil
worked to fulfill a Fordist fantasy of bringing “modernity” and “progress”
to the “almost impenetrable tropical jungle.”5 Ford’s ventures in Brazil at-
tempted to impose a vision of the future, as conjured up by commerce,
profit making, and Western modernity, upon a geography he imagined to
be stuck in prehistoric time. In this way, this U.S. captain of industry ex-
tends the imperialist logics of Victorian England, for example, by figuring
“geographical difference across space [. . .] as a historical difference across
time.”6 Furthermore, these land speculations—brokered through a collu-
26 - CHAPTER 1
sion between scientific and economic interests—relied on the production
of several fictions about the working habits of indigenous peoples, the rain-
forest’s resilience, and capitalism’s deliverables to succeed.
Roughly twenty years before Greg Grandin’s 2009 history of Ford-
lándia brought renewed attention to Ford’s Amazonian exploits, the Japa-
nese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita excavated this largely forgotten
scene of U.S. imperialism in Brazil when she set her 1990 speculative fic-
tion, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, largely at the scene of rubber extrac-
tion in the Brazilian rainforest. Through the Arc extrapolates from Ford’s
imperialist legacies to project into the near future what might happen to
the Amazon when a valuable, rubber-like resource is unearthed during an
age of global capitalist restructuring.
By calling attention to the buried histories to which Yamashita play-
fully alludes, I place Through the Arc’s historical speculations in critical dia-
logue with other kinds of scientific fictions that have worked on behalf
of European and U.S. empire building to render the resource-rich jungle
available for imperial conquest and expansion. To do this work, Yamashita’s
speculative fiction itself suggests a methodology of excavation, both ar-
chaeological and genealogical in the Foucauldian sense. Because Through
the Arc presents itself as a form of speculation in conversation with other
forms, including land and financial speculation, this methodological ex-
periment—of extrapolation via excavation—highlights how modernity
and indeed futurity traffic in racisms that emerge from a discursive rela-
tion to older discourses of race that are, in Ann Laura Stoler’s words, “‘re-
covered,’ modified, ‘encased,’ and ‘encrusted’ in new forms.”7 Excavation, as
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd formulate it in their introduction to The Politics
of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, enacts a practice of “looking to the shad-
ows” for “alternative histories and their different temporalities that cannot
be contained by the progressive narrative of Western developmentalism.”8
Along these lines, Yamashita’s Through the Arc looks to the shadows of capi-
tal in the Amazon rainforest to offer an alternative to developmental histo-
riography, to teleological narration, to a profit-driven futurity.
This chapter considers a history of imperial and neocolonial structures
in Brazil, the overlapping nature of various empires in South America, and
the technoracialization of the global Asian subject.9 In Through the Arc,
Yamashita focuses on the presence of U.S. multinational corporations in
Latin America as a manifestation of a longer history of empire in Brazil.
The narrative suggests that earlier empire-builders shrewdly cultivated a
I M P E R I A L R U B B E R - 27
racialized understanding of the tropics and established the beginnings of a
history of imperial efforts in the guise of benevolent enterprises, including
tropical medicine, technological development, and philanthropic founda-
tions that supported scientific and medical research.
Despite bearing many of the characteristics of science fiction and fan-
tasy, Yamashita’s oeuvre rarely gets categorized as speculative fiction. Vari-
ous literary critics and book reviewers call Through the Arc a “fine, satirical
piece of writing,” a “freewheeling black comedy,” “a burlesque of comic strip
adventures and apocalyptic portents,”10 and “an exuberant melodrama.”11
What I am calling the speculative arcs of Yamashita’s works refers to
arcs across both space and time. Yamashita’s speculative fictions operate as
technologies of memory that revisit historical narratives even as they are
drawn into the transtemporal fabric of futuristic and alternative worlds. If,
as Marita Sturken has argued, a “culture of amnesia” in the United States
not only does not remember war and trauma but also generates “memory in
new forms,”12 the process constitutes a form of temporal colonization, vio-
lent in its displacement of subjects and events that expose contradictions
between capitalist expansionism and the neoliberal rhetoric of “free” trade.
The Eurocentric narration of the discovery of rubber by La Condamine,
for example, displaces indigenous memories of foreign incursion. It is at
that scene of temporal colonization that Yamashita revisits to recalibrate
a skewed extrapolation point. In the context of speculative fiction, which
posits space-time as a four-dimensional continuum of time and space,
speculation serves as a useful tactic for those who would travel through
time to revisit obfuscated historical moments that nevertheless continue to
inform narratives of the present and extrapolations of the future.
In the speculative landscape of Through the Arc, it is not only a legacy
of globalization but also a history of science that Yamashita excavates in
the Amazon rainforest. Through subtle yet striking allusions to Fordlándia
and to nearly obsessive European ethnographic forays to Brazil during the
same time period, Yamashita’s Through the Arc implicates Western science’s
collusion with European and U.S. imperialist enterprises. In my analysis
of Fordlándia, I examine the larger project of Fordist social reform, which
extended its reach beyond the United States under the banners of benevo-
lent science and technological progress. Because the plantation met with
consistent financial difficulties, Fordlándia’s justification for renewed
funding and support relied heavily on its self-promotion as a civilizing mis-
sion. The rubber plantation unrelentingly disciplined its primarily indige-
28 - CHAPTER 1
nous laboring subjects through the imposition of U.S. social institutions
(schools, churches, and hospitals), cultural practices (the prohibition of
drinking and smoking and viewings of Hollywood films), and labor admin-
istration (the insistence that workers punch in and out at a central me-
chanical timeclock, abide a nine-to-five workday despite prohibitive mid-
day heat, and wear identification badges). By foregrounding this Fordist
experiment in her decolonial speculative fiction, Yamashita provides the
occasion for readers to understand the continuity across La Condamine’s
expedition and Ford’s enterprises in the Amazon rainforest. If Charles de
La Condamine saw a profit to be made from sensationalizing his account
of the tropical jungle, Henry Ford recognized an opportunity to string in-
vestors along by promising to bring assembly-line, plantation-style order to
it. EuroAmerican notions of technoscientific modernity prepare the ideo-
logical groundwork for neocolonial capitalist enterprises that exploit al-
ready racialized and gendered ideas of the tropics to subject workers at
the equator to labor practices imported from Michigan. The unexpected
and thrilling maneuver that Yamashita plots is for Through the Arc to meet
Fordist ideologies of development at the level of representation, critiquing
imperialist fantasies of the tropics by staging an oversaturated, fantastical
spectacularization of the rainforest itself, allowing those deeply embedded,
earlier colonial fantasies to surface and be examined.
Spectacular undertakings in the Amazon rainforest hardly begin or
end with Fordlándia, and Yamashita references several more notable ex-
amples in Through the Arc. When the ceo of a multinational corporation
decides to transport its twenty-three-story headquarters in its entirety
from Manhattan to the dense tropical rainforest, Yamashita cites two “his-
toric precedents for such a grandiose move” (76).13 The first is the Teatro
Amazonas opera house in Manaus, Brazil, built in 1896 with the desire to
bring the material signifiers of European civilization to the heart of the
jungle, achieved by incorporating imported French tiles, Italian marble,
and Murano glass chandeliers. Similarly, the opera house in the novel has
“imported . . . every detail from the iron fixtures to the parquet floors from
England” (76). The novel also references U.S. billionaire Daniel Ludwig’s
far-fetched plan to float a fully constructed pulp mill and factory on two
giant pontoons from Japan to the Brazilian city of Munguba in 1978 “for the
purpose of churning everything into tons of useful paper” (76). Ludwig’s
almost science-fictional proposal perhaps also inspires Fitzcarraldo’s hoist-
ing of a steamship across a mountain in Herzog’s film.
I pull these spectacular shenanigans from the Brazilian Amazon to dem-
onstrate how empire in its various permutations—from Ford to Herzog,
and from opera houses to floating factories—has historically rendered the
Amazon a speculative space in at least two ways. First, these commercial
and cultural incursions point to European and U.S. capitalist speculations,
which have attempted to lay claim to tropical resources in the rainforest
since the early colonial period. Second, these enterprises work in conjunc-
tion with a system of fantastical speculations that constructs a tropicalist
imaginary sustained through colonialist visual and literary representations
of the jungle.14 The cultural production of the jungle as feral and overgrown
sets up the narrative occasion for staging a neocolonial intervention. Yama-
shita’s alternative fabulation shifts the site of agency to an always already
willful rainforest, where the seemingly indefatigable capitalist appetite for
more consumption of human and natural resources must be kept in check.
Extrapolation through Excavation:

Through the Arc of the (Haunted) Rainforest
Narrated by a sentient alien sphere orbiting around the head of a Japanese
Brazilian migrant, Through the Arc revisits the speculative space of the Ama-
zon and summons several extraordinary, if not extraterrestrial, subjects to
the site, including Kazumasa Ishimaru, the former Japanese railroad in-
spector from whose cranial orbit the gyrating, rubberized sphere narrates
the novel; Batista and Tania Aparecida Djapan, who manage a worldwide,
fortune-telling, courier pigeon service; Mané Pena, a healer indigenous
to the Amazon Valley who cures people of their afflictions using a magical
feather; Chico Paco, a religious pilgrim turned radio evangelist whose love
for his disabled neighbor, Gilberto, motivates his faith; and J. B. Tweep, a
three-armed entrepreneur from the United States who becomes enamored
not only with corporate expansion in Brazil but also with a triple-breasted
French ornithologist named Michelle Mabelle. Through these character-
izations, Yamashita presents an Amazon populated not only by indigenous
inhabitants but also by local and global travelers who arrive at the rain-
forest via circuits of migration, capital expansion, and religious journeys.
Manifestations of the alien in this Asian American speculative fiction
take the shape not of racially marked invader-others but of Northern and
Western mutant agents of empire (such as the aforementioned triple-
breasted European scientist and three-armed U.S. businessman). Mabelle
30 - CHAPTER 1
and Tweep embody the overindulgent desires of colonial and neocolonial
enterprises in the Amazon. Their marriage—a union between science and
capitalism—unlocks a “capacity for insatiable lust” and “the possibilities of
unmitigated pleasure” (123). Mabelle, who “came from a long line of bird
lovers,” including a great-grandfather who “met Paul Gauguin in Tahiti”
(122), studies exotic birds of the Amazon through the cultivated, colo-
nial gaze of the tropics, exemplified in Gauguin’s fetishization of Tahitian
women in his paintings and writings.15 Mabelle pursues her research in the
vein of the scientific expeditions that occasioned many of the first Euro-
pean ventures to South America. For example, the French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss conducted some of his earliest ethnographic fieldwork
in Brazil between 1935 and 1939. The resulting Tristes Tropiques—a combi-
nation of memoir, field journal, and social science manifesto—begins with
the paradoxical declaration: “Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs” (I hate
traveling and explorers).16 The volume, which Yamashita references in her
“Author’s Note” to Through the Arc and which reveals Lévi-Strauss’s constant
wrestling with the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork and professed disgust
with scientific adventure writing, has become a staple in anthropological
debate. While describing the “basic elements” of the Brazilian soap opera,
or novela, form that inspired Through the Arc, Yamashita writes: “Claude
Levi-Strauss described it all so well so many years ago: Tristes Tropiques—an
idyll of striking innocence, boundless nostalgia and terrible ruthlessness”
(Author’s Note). By juxtaposing a foundational text of Western social sci-
ence with Brazilian popular culture, Yamashita asserts that Tristes Tropiques
and the Brazilian novela share a penchant for melodrama and sensation that
render them both speculative texts, participating in the perpetual reconsti-
tution of a national and international understanding of Brazilian culture.
Tweep’s enterprising efforts in the Amazon point to the commercial in-
volvement of the United States in Brazil during the early twentieth cen-
tury and its efforts to incorporate Latin America into its manifest destiny.
With three arms, he is the figuration of relentlessly reaching, U.S.-based,
multinational corporations with interests overseas. Through Tweep’s story,
Yamashita complicates the alien encounter. His experience of his alien
body asserts a level of acceptance not usually associated with mutation and
difference: he thinks of his physical difference as an asset. “As far as J.B. was
concerned,” writes Yamashita, “he had entered a new genetic plane in the
species. . . . He was a better model, the wave of the future” (30). In his eyes,
his third arm renders him so exceptional that he exceeds the normative
bounds of the world around him. He finds that the assembly line, musical
compositions, and conventional sporting rules cannot adjust their logics
for his extraordinary abilities. He throws off the rhythm of production by
working too efficiently, gets bored with Beethoven and Chopin because
“there was nothing written for his particular expertise,” and gets kicked off
his baseball team “because there were no rules for a two-mitt player” (31).
In Tweep’s case, difference may lead to unemployment and ostracism, but
it is quickly converted to a position of exceptionalism. His extraordinary
abilities find their ultimate fulfillment in the service of the ever-insatiable
appetite and ever-expanding domain of capitalism. On the one hand, Yama-
shita’s critique of a bilaterally biased world interrogates the systemic scope
of normativity. On the other hand, her depiction of the multinational cor-
poration leader is one of excess and mutation.
The terrain Through the Arc examines is itself a mutant space. Described
as “an enormous impenetrable field of some unknown solid substance,
stretching for millions of acres in all directions” along the floor of the rain-
forest, the Matacão attracts the attention of “scientists, supernaturalists
and et enthusiasts, sporting the old Spielberg rubber masks” (16). Though
early conjectures characterize the Matacão as alien, this miraculously pli-
able and tensile material turns out not to be otherworldly but very much a
product of earth’s own making:
The Matacão, scientists asserted, had been formed for the most part
within the last century, paralleling the development of the more com-
mon forms of plastic, polyurethane and Styrofoam. Enormous land-
fills of non-biodegradable material buried under virtually every popu-
lated part of the Earth had undergone tremendous pressure, pushed
ever farther into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle. The liquid de-
posits of the molten mass had been squeezed through underground
veins to virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon Forest, being one of
the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty. (202)
Rather than animating the Matacão plastic as an invasive foreigner, Yama-
shita insists that it is the disavowed slag of capitalist overaccumulation and
hubris. As the text unfolds against the backdrop of the Matacão, Yamashita
denudes the mystique constructed around it, revealing the black plastic
to be the compressed regurgitation of First World waste—the by-product
of the most powerful and productive economies, surfacing in the Third
World. The rubbery and plastic properties of the Matacão allude to the re-
32 - CHAPTER 1
silience and flexibility of empire, which continues to resurface in mutated
form in Yamashita’s extrapolation of this near future that emerges from
an excavated history of U.S. and European empire in the South Ameri-
can tropics. Through the Arc’s rainforest is a speculative space in which all
sorts of discarded, forgotten, and disavowed histories bubble to the surface.
Henri Bergson might consider it a symbol of duration: “Duration is the con-
tinuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells
as it advances.”17 Just adjacent to the Matacão rests a graveyard of military
vehicles, war planes, and Ford Model Ts. Amid the gray, sticky goop of na-
palm, this rainforest “parking lot” gives rise to a strange new species of
mouse and spectacular new colorations for butterflies, birds, and amphibi-
ans (99). Yamashita writes: “The entomologists were shocked to discover
that their rare butterfly only nested in the vinyl seats of Fords and Chevro-
lets and that their exquisite reddish coloring was actually due to a steady
diet of hydrated ferric oxide, or rusty water from the oxidation of aban-
doned US military vehicles” (100).
In this example, Yamashita upsets the teleological narrative of scien-
tific discovery. The most exotic looking tropical species of the Amazon are
already biologically entangled with clandestine neocolonial projects in Bra-
zil. The spectacular colorations of these jungle organisms come from their
nibbling on the rusty skeletons of U.S. industrial and military vehicles. This
surprising diet serves as a piquant reminder of the U.S. military presence
in Latin America throughout the twentieth century. In another example of
resurfacing discarded histories, Yamashita continues to interrogate West-
ern interpretations of the Amazon through the questionable lens of early
ethnographic research. She writes: “Some anthropologist ran about fran-
tically re-editing and annotating a soon-to-be-published article about the
primitive use of mirrors in ancient religious rites” after encountering the
shiny bumpers and rearview mirrors stripped from the cars in the rain-
forest parking lot (100). Yamashita’s construction of the Amazon forces
a revision of romanticized and overdetermined views of the tropics held
over from nineteenth-century European representations of the jungle as a
space of unspoiled, unfettered nature, in need of discovery and discipline
through interpretation, conquest, and/or exploitation. This anthropolo-
gist’s forced reevaluation of the tropics also points to productions of scien-
tific knowledge in the Amazon that changed medical history in Europe. In
her history of “tropical empiricism,” Brazilian scholar Júnia Ferreira Fur-
tado writes: “Knowledge gleaned from new elements found in these exotic
environments . . . would later transform medicinal practice in Portugal, the
East, and in South America, and would force authors to adopt new classi-
fication schemes, which in turn stimulated the extensive production of lit-
erature mixing medicine and natural history.”18 In this way, the multidirec-
tional flow of scientific knowledge production depicted in Through the Arc
upsets the colonial construction of center and periphery.
The historian of science Nancy Leys Stepan situates the enduring tropi-
calist representations of the rainforest in the context of European em-
pire building, the emergence of racist pseudoscience, and ethnographic
travel and tourism to Latin America.19 Yamashita revises the jungle narra-
tive of tropical danger and contagion by tracing the perception of a wild,
unbridled, mutant landscape back to not only imperial fantasies but also
the material operations of empire in the Amazon. By embedding the rain-
forest floor with a mantle of manmade, first-world solidified sludge, Yama-
shita suggests that the jungle, when excavated, reveals a cavernous sys-
tem of Northern or European appetite for mining resources and disavowal
through a projection of exoticism. This disavowal takes material form in the
pollution, waste, and overaccumulation of capitalist imperialism.
While the novel tropes mutated bodies as indicators of U.S. and Euro-
pean imperialist developments in the Amazon, it also—through Ishimaru’s
intricate and profound attachment to his satellite orb—raises questions
about Japan’s sometimes contradictory connections to the expansive logics
of late capitalism. As Rachel Lee has deftly argued, Yamashita’s character-
ization of Ishimaru gestures not only to the familiar archetype in Asian
American literature of the Chinese American railroad worker, but also to
“an elite transnational” in “a world where Asian immigrants to the Ameri-
cas are just as likely to be the owners of capital and the exploiters of labor
as to be the persecuted migrant worker.”20 Because it detects new sources
of Matacão plastic, the orbiting sphere and Kazumasa Ishimaru become
“the key to this incredible source of wealth” (144). As Ishimaru’s monetary
and spinning peripheral assets become increasingly embroiled in the ex-
pansionist project of Tweep’s multinational corporation, the ball remarks:
“Greed was a horrible thing. Kazumasa could, if necessary, divest himself of
his monetary fortune, but he could not rid himself of me” (145). The ball, a
gravitational force with its own narrative voice, attaches to Ishimaru, pull-
ing him toward the epicenter of neocolonial transformation of the Amazon.
What exactly can Kazumasa divest himself of and what can he not? Wealth.
Monetary fortune. But not this constant relationship to the buried past, to
34 - CHAPTER 1
history, to the seething substrate of the planet’s materials and the human
and nonhuman entanglements therein. The ball’s attraction to the Mata-
cão points not only to Japan’s history as an empire hungry for resource-rich
territories (resulting in increased military expansionism during the 1930s
in Manchuria, Micronesia, and Southeast Asia), but also to more contem-
porary investments of Japanese global capital in Latin America, which, ac-
cording to recent studies of Japanese-owned maquiladoras, are responsible
for the generation of an egregious amount of hazardous waste.21 The orbital
adjustments that Ishimaru and the orb make in conjunction with one an-
other’s trajectories enact precisely the nature-cultural entanglements
feminist science studies scholars such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad
have theorized through other examples.22 At the end of the novel, Ishimaru
suffers and mourns the loss of his attachment to that which marked him as
alien. While still tenuously connected to Western capitalist enterprises, he
negotiates multiple transnational affiliations, which remain visible in “the
tropical tilt of his head” (211).
Ishimaru’s sphere is comprised of the same magnetized and extremely
durable plastic material as the Matacão, and, despite its crash landing into
the text (and Ishimaru’s orbit) from outer space in chapter 1, its path of mi-
gration reveals it to be not an alien but an indigenous body, returning to its
point of origin. This revelation raises the question: What is alien? If even
the most alien-looking entity in this work of speculative fiction turns out
to be of the earth, then can one extrapolate that migrant subjects are not
so easily defined as alien or native either? If the Amazon rainforest yields
a seemingly new raw material that turns out to be the recycled detritus of
the so-called civilized world, then what is excavated in the Third World
is already tangled in the machinations of the First World. The story of the
alien thus always returns the reader to a layered history of imperialist ven-
tures into the Amazon that mine the rainforest for its resources. The irony
of this connection between the alien and the imperialist invader is the his-
tory of jungle narratives that imagine the jungle from the perspective of the
colonizer or the neocolonial entrepreneur as an alien space of extraordi-
nary flora and fauna and primitive peoples. To this extent, Through the Arc’s
rainforest becomes a site of excavating imperial legacies rather than a site
that empire relentlessly mines.
The text works structurally to emphasize this theme of returns and
disrupt the developmental narrative that has often accompanied the re-
lating of Asian American history and the story of developing nations. While
Through the Arc is an Asian American immigrant narrative, it belies one
kind of very limited immigrant narrative that constructs the trajectory of
immigration as one that involves leaving a homeland to arrive in a new
world where assimilation is upheld as the path to success. Structurally,
Through the Arc rejects such a teleological organization, moving through
parts titled “The Beginning,” “The Developing World,” and “More Devel-
opment” but then to “Loss of Innocence,” “More Loss,” and “Return.” It is
a structure that refuses the developmental narrative that often accompa-
nies the discourses around both immigration and developing countries. In
Ishimaru’s name and in the title of a related Yamashita work, Brazil-Maru,
Yamashita riffs on the Japanese suffix “maru,” which means cycle or circle.
The suffix also significantly gestures toward the names of the transpacific
ships that facilitated Japanese immigration to South America. In 1908, the
Kasato-Maru brought the first 781 Japanese immigrants to the port of San-
tos in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Brazil-Maru was the name of the vessel that
shuttled tens of thousands of Japanese settlers to Brazil, Argentina, and
Peru for two decades following World War II.23 From its title and epigraph,
Through the Arc emphasizes the cyclical processes that reflect Yamashita’s
fascination with these transpacific migrations, which reveal dynamic and
diverse circulations of people rather than unidirectional movements from
one place to another. The epigraph reads: “I have heard Brazilian children
say that whatever passes through the arc of a rainbow becomes its oppo-
site. But what is the opposite of a bird? Or for that matter, a human being?
And what then, is the great rain forest, where, in its season, the rain never
ceases and the rainbows are myriad?” Yamashita’s ruminations here—on
arcs of migration, myriad passages across ephemeral boundaries, and the
complex unfolding of transformation—characterize the central themes of
her work and attest to her refusal of an uncomplicated narrative. The pas-
sage presents the rainforest as an already speculative space, where con-
stant precipitation yields a propensity for messy mutation, not neatly pack-
aged transformation.
Through the Arc’s account of movement proves too dynamic, varied, and
unpredictable to abide the artificial parameters of an immigrant narrative
uncomplicatedly plotted along the Old World to New World telos. Pub-
lished in 1990, Yamashita’s text pays attention to the profound shifts in
the conditions of Japanese-Brazilian immigration to Brazil that occurred
during the 1980s. Migration from Japan to Brazil had begun shortly after
the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, but Japan had long since out-
36 - CHAPTER 1
paced Brazil in economic development, recovering from World War II as
“an industrial power of the first rank.”24 In 1990, Japan, in an effort to fill
a deficit of unskilled industrial labor, issued an invitation to overseas Japa-
nese and their descendants, including about 200,000 in Brazil, to “return”
to Japan, though for most, the return actually constituted immigration.
Though Japan had initially turned to workers from Pakistan, Iran, and
Bangladesh, Japanese Brazilians were considered more assimilatable sub-
jects who could fill the same labor niche without presenting Japan with
an overtly visible (and racialized) face of migrant labor.25 In Yamashita’s
Through the Arc, movements of peoples are understood to be incredibly
complex, in that multiple systems of racialization and shifting centers of
global capital inform and shape the patterns of migration. The substantial
migration of Japanese Brazilians to Japan in the late 1980s and 1990s ren-
ders the telling of Asian American history as having only one trajectory an
impossibility and inaccuracy. The alien invader, in Yamashita’s revision of
a well-rehearsed science fiction trope, turns out to be a return of the re-
pressed and literally attaches itself to the story of Japanese Brazilian im-
migration.
Through the Arc is a haunted text occupied by a repressed history of Ford-
ist tropicalism. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination,
Avery Gordon asks us to approach haunted texts and the ghosts they pro-
duce as an opening to remember the disappeared, the dispossessed, and
the disavowed by threading “the ghost story” through materialist histori-
ography.26 Yamashita’s Through the Arc similarly combines fantastical genre
with feminist, indigenous, decolonial critique of European imperialist and
U.S. neocolonial enterprises in the Amazon. While the fabulist tale strikes
a degree of levity in tone, Through the Arc issues a critique of ecological non-
chalance, the avaricious tenacity of multinational corporations, a history
of racist science in a racially mixed and idealized country, and U.S. neo-
colonial presence in Brazil under the guise of scientific improvement and
benevolent medical care. Through a blend of magical realist and science
fictional conventions, Yamashita explores the troubling collusion between
science and neocolonial enterprises in developing countries, the layered
and intertwined legacies of empire in the Americas and Asia, and the re-
lationship between nationalism and narratives of progress. These are the
various ghosts that haunt Through the Arc, and the ectoplasm that bubbles
up from the floor of the Amazon jungle is the “seething presence” of the
Matacão.27
Imperial Rubber: Residues of U.S. Empire
in the Brazilian Rainforest
Take away from us the motor vehicle, and I do not know what would happen. The dam-
age would be more serious and lasting than if our land were laid waste by an invader.
We could recover from the blowing up of New York City and all the big cities on the
Atlantic seaboard more quickly than we could recover from the loss of our rubber.
—H A RV E Y F I R E S T O N E , Men and Rubber
“History is more or less bunk.”

—H E N RY F O R D , The Chicago Tribune
“The ghostly matter will not go away. It is waiting for you and it will shadow you and it
will outwit all your smart moves as that jungle grows thicker and deeper.”
—AV E RY G O R D O N , Ghostly Matters
The rubbery resource excavated at the Matacão can be molded into any
shape and has the structural integrity of steel. One of the most fantasti-
cal manifestations of the malleable material’s architectural possibilities is
an amusement park. “Chicolándia,” named after the local entrepreneurial
character Chico Paco, who conceived of and constructed it for his gay lover,
also constitutes Through the Arc’s most concrete allusion to the U.S. neo-
colonial presence in the Amazon. Ford’s plantation project instantiates an
extension of U.S. cultural and economic imperialism in Brazil, and Through
the Arc revisits the Amazon as a speculative space haunted by this history
of neocolonial enterprise, known more generally as the Amazon rubber
boom. In this section, I consider the conditions already in place that en-
abled the Ford Motor Company to establish itself so readily in the Amazon
rainforest. Through an examination of company-archived pamphlets and
photographs, newspaper articles, and plantation managers’ journals of the
1920s through the 1940s, I show how Ford’s civilizing mission borrowed
from preexisting discourses on tropical nature, race, and sexuality promul-
gated by nineteenth-century French and British scientific expeditions into
the Amazon.
Since the 1870s, Dutch and British entrepreneurs had established an ex-
pansive and successful rubber tree empire in Asia. In 1922, the British Rub-
ber Restoration Act (also known as the Stevenson Plan) sought to double
the price of rubber, which would exert pressure on the growing U.S. auto-
mobile empire. British domination of the world rubber market threatened
Ford’s vision of complete vertical integration of his automotive industry
(from rubber tree plantations to tires on Model Ts). In retaliation, Ford
38 - CHAPTER 1
and Harvey Firestone mobilized a campaign to break the emerging rubber
cartel. Because rubber tree cultivation is restricted to tropical climates,
the resulting competition among British, Dutch, and U.S. rubber indus-
tries in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brazil, respectively, creates an interest-
ing connection between British and Dutch imperialism in Asia and U.S.
neocolonial investments in Latin America.28 Two decades later, between
1942 and 1945, British Malaya and Singapore came under Japanese im-
perial rule. Japan’s interest in these regions was arguably due in large part
to the rubber resources it would gain access to and control over during
World War II. These connections suggest the multiple, interconnected, and
various machinations of empire.
Organized and run as a U.S. plantation, Fordlándia implemented a
series of social ordering structures that helped sustain the racialized as-
pect of benevolent supremacy rationalizing the U.S. neocolonial presence
in Brazil. To conform to U.S. work practices, local laborers were required to
work during the most exhausting midday hours, wear identification badges,
and eat hamburgers and hot dogs in a cafeteria. In December 1930, when
the workers at Fordlándia revolted, they targeted all things emblematic of
Fordist ideologies and practices. The workers made a point of overturning
automobiles and smashing the time clocks (see figure 1.1). In the Amazon,
so close to the equator, it would seem sensible that rhythms of work abide
by the sun. At high noon, workers would do well to find a cool spot and
rest, saving their energy to labor under the less punishing temperatures of
the early morning and post-sundown hours. Not so at Fordlándia, where—
as noted above—the managers enforced a nine-to-five workday, requiring
workers to punch in and out as they would on the factory floor in Detroit.
In fact, watches and clocks in Fordlándia were set to Detroit time, an hour
earlier than the rest of the state of Pará.
Although Fordlándia sought to deliver the “homogeneous, empty time”
that, as Walter Benjamin argues, forms the cornerstone of the concept of
progress, time instantiates the Fordist fantasy of exercising social and eco-
nomic controls over labor and leisure in the Amazon.29 By dismantling fix-
tures of Fordist ideas of modernity and developmental notions of progress,
the workers demonstrated their profound objection to the temporal and
gustatory imperialism that arrived with Ford’s neocolonial plantation
settlement.
Workers also directed their frustrations at other invasive cultural sys-
tems that sought to force a certain digestive and temporal regimenta-
Figure 1.1. Fordlándia time clock, destroyed in the riot of December 1930. From the
Collections of The Henry Ford. Gift of Ford Motor Company. Object id: 64.167.74.5
tion onto their everyday lives. Images of Fordlándia resemble a suburban
grid, complete with stucco dwellings, power lines, (segregated) swimming
pools, and a hospital. Inhabitants of Fordlándia were forbidden from drink-
ing and smoking; the children wore school uniforms; and in their leisure
time, employees could attend the company-run churches and motion pic-
ture theaters or even play golf on the eighteen-hole course “700 miles from
civilization”—“everything necessary for the health, happiness and well-
being of Ford employees.”30 A company brochure emphasizes the planta-
tion’s role in “modernizing” the tropics, calling attention repeatedly to the
“modern hospital” and describing Fordlándia as “a modern city” that took
the place of “the trackless green waste” of “the almost impenetrable tropi-
cal jungle.” Targeting current and potential investors, the promotional pam-
phlet blames the Brazilian plantation’s shortcomings on increased demand
for rubber and the more rigorous scientific development of rubber culti-
vation technologies in Asia. It suggests that in “the early days of automo-
biles, before the need was so great, the unskilled methods of natives pro-
duced most of the world’s supply of rubber from the jungles of Brazil.” The
company characterizes preplantation rubber cultivation as the rudimen-
tary and primitive production of “jungle natives.” With increased demand,
though, the brochure explains: “Brazil lost its preeminent place to the Far
East, which developed scientific methods of tree culture that resulted in
greater yield and higher quality of crude rubber.” In this way, the brochure
renders a history of the Amazon that narrates the need for technoscien-
tific intervention to restore Brazil’s preeminence in the rubber industry.
Many pages of the brochure comment on the transformative power of in-
dustry, comparing Fordlándia’s residences to “any midwestern [sic] town”
or “a winter home in Florida” and taking great pains to amplify the re-
markable nature of such a feat “in the heart of Brazil”: “Shades of Tarzan!
You’d never guess these bright, happy, healthy school children lived in a
jungle city that didn’t even exist a few years ago.” News media coverage
of Ford’s developments in the Amazon rainforest highlighted the planta-
tion’s school system and included several photographs of Indian children
in clean white uniforms standing and saluting the motto on the Brazilian
flag: “Ordem e Progresso” (order and progress). Through the company bro-
chure and other media engagements, the Ford Motor Company and Ford
himself produced “consumer spectacles” for the general public and potential
investors.31 Set in the Amazon rainforest, these spectacles capitalized on
an already existing imperialist imaginary of the tropical New World passed
on from EuroAmerican artifacts of knowledge such as the fantastical ac-
counts of the La Condamine expedition. Ford’s speculative productions, in
which he promises a civilizing mission that could tame not only the unruly
jungle but also the denizens of the Amazon Valley, had a prequel in the
form of eighteenth-century travel writing that passed as scientific knowl-
edge production. But these Fordist fictions also drew on other sources of
inspiration, including early twentieth-century ideas about race and evo-
lution, emerging alongside a contemporaneous eugenics movement and
U.S.-led sterilization campaigns in the Global South. Because much of the
scientific world, as it lived in both individual scientists and institutions
backing scientific research in Europe and North America, was arranging
racial difference along a hierarchy, Ford’s global capitalist ventures, which
benefited from such stratifications in producing cheap labor, took up these
notions readily, while also combining them with Brazilian ideas of race
mixing from thinkers such as Gilberto Freyre, who wanted to move Brazil
toward a “racial democracy,” to more overtly white supremacist notions of
racial whitening.32
In a document titled “Living Conditions in the Amazon Valley,” written
on May 6, 1927, Carl D. LaRue depicts first and foremost a destitute Pará
state: “In the smaller villages and along the rivers, the people are every-
where poor and forlorn. Most of them are penniless and without hope for
the future” (box 1, “History and Cost,” accession #74, 1). In this scouting
report, LaRue sets the stage for Fordist reform by describing the need for a
civilizing mission, a need for a restoration of “hope for the future” through
financial, international speculation. LaRue’s sympathetic attention to the
poor living conditions of the local peoples, though, quickly reveals itself to
have more than one motivation. His concern for the health and happiness
of these people stems from his estimation of them as potential laboring
bodies in Fordlándia’s future workforce: “These people are usually called
lazy, improvident, thriftless, etc., and it is true that they are not ener-
getic, but when we consider that they are racked with disease, and have
never been properly nourished in their lives, one wonders at their powers
of endurance” (1). LaRue’s characterization of these potential laborers as
disease-ridden and poorly nourished establishes an occasion for a medi-
cal intervention as a means of bolstering the labor supply while assuming
a position of humanitarian aid, benevolent force, and civilizing mission.
Indeed, historian Elizabeth Esch notes that it was precisely “the people of
the region and their capacity for the modernizing the company intended”
42 - CHAPTER 1
that became a prime factor in deciding whether Sumatra or the Amazon
would serve Ford’s needs best.33 In his exploratory report of the area, LaRue
reports that in 1927: “No attention is paid to housing such people or look-
ing after their health.” His subsequent call for medical aid that a Ford-run
operation could deliver is tied to a racialized concept of health and hy-
giene prevalent among eugenicists of the time. Referring to the potential
plantation workers as “magnificent specimens,” LaRue writes: “The dwell-
ers of the Amazon Valley are of three main stocks: Indian, Portuguese and
Negro.” LaRue’s taxonomic approach to race continues as he explains how
“admixture has gone on so long that it is difficult to distinguish the different
types. The mixture is not a particularly good one from a racial standpoint,
but it is by no means a bad one.”
What “racial standpoint” does LaRue take for granted here? In the
United States around 1927, the wide acceptance of scientific racism and eu-
genicist thought led to compulsory sterilization practices and immigration
restriction legislation. However, 1927 also marks the height of Brazil’s own
debates around race that emerged in relation but also in contradistinction
to European and U.S. racial ideologies. Prior to the publication of Freyre’s
work on racial democracy, this period witnessed efforts among Brazilian
authorities and landed gentry, informed by European racial pseudoscience,
to push for a “whitening” of the Brazilian population in the decades follow-
ing the abolition of slavery in 1888.34 As a natural scientist and as a Ford
employee, LaRue likely brought to his scouting report on the Amazon his
own version of white supremacy, bolstered by the prevailing racial ideolo-
gies of U.S. science and industry. Concurrently, the converging discourses
of Brazilian racial improvement and Ford’s civilizing mission are rather
suggestive.
LaRue’s conclusion to his report reinforces this connection between the
two discourses of improvement: “The salvation of these people lies in some
development which will give them employment at reasonable wages and
with decent living conditions. . . . This is an opportunity to do a great ser-
vice to hundreds of deserving folk” (5). For LaRue, capitalist development
leads to “salvation,” and he thus reveals himself to be a devout believer in
Fordist reform as a universal imperative.
LaRue’s final rallying call reveals the racial typologies of this period,
largely built around now-discredited areas of pseudoscientific research
such as craniometry and phrenology. “The fate of these people,” he reports,
“is the more tragic because they are not possessed of the stolidity of many
of the orientals, but have enough of the white race in them to suffer keenly
and long intensely for better things. As it is, their condition is worse than
that of any of the coolies in the East; far worse even than that of the average
slave in the old days” (4). In this astonishing quotation, LaRue’s preoccu-
pation with the competing rubber industry in Southeast Asia manifests
itself in this racialized comparison between Asian and Brazilian mixed-
race labor. Conscious of the fact that local Indian labor “is somewhat more
expensive than in the East,” LaRue argues that this cost differential is off-
set by the fact that Brazilian “labor is also more intelligent than the aver-
age labor in the East” (“A Report on the Exploration of the Tapajos Valley”;
April 19, 1927, box 1, “History and Cost,” accession #74, 5). He also explains
that “the use of machines on the modern plantation should offset this ad-
vantage in the East” (5). In his entreaty to Ford to create his rubber empire
in Brazil rather than in Sumatra, LaRue mobilizes two contradictory Ori-
entalist formulations of Asia as, on the one hand, hopelessly unmodern and
less intelligent, and on the other hand, at an advantage and in less need of
being saved by Fordist progress.
The passage also reveals LaRue’s efforts to distance his and Ford’s mis-
sion in the Amazon from the systems of oppression at work in European
colonization of Southeast Asia, the United States’ own slave past, as well
as other rubber operations in Brazil. In one of the more remarkable pas-
sages of his report, LaRue encounters and disparages another rubber plant
run by a Syrian named Michel. “In common with the other Syrians,” re-
ports LaRue, “he grinds down his men and gives them less than enough
to buy an adequate supply of even the simplest food” (3).35 LaRue sets up
Ford’s vision as a liberatory intervention: “One of the great things which
the development of this country will bring is the relief of these unfortunate
people” (3). To position U.S. capitalist expansion as humanitarian relief,
LaRue intertwines his roles as a geographer, anthropologist, and corpo-
rate scout. He becomes a speculator of potential natural and human re-
sources, projecting narrative and fantasy across those geographies in order
to attract the venture capital needed to sustain the plantation. In this way,
LaRue’s report does the promissory work of speculative writing. It, along
with the promotional brochure aimed at potential investors, not only re-
flects but also produces the fantasies of rendering laborers docile, deliv-
ering modernity to the jungle, and accumulating high-density wealth that
were all part of Ford’s material and ideological speculations in the Brazil-
ian Amazon.36
44 - CHAPTER 1
Contrary to the Fordist fantasy of modernizing and regulating the
tropics, Fordlándia ultimately and utterly failed. The workers rebelled, as
did the rainforest, and the Fordist project in Brazil settled into relative
obscurity. Therefore, Yamashita’s late twentieth-century excavation of this
largely forgotten Amazonian rubber plantation helps situate her extrapola-
tive imagining of twenty-first century capitalization on rainforest resources
in a longer history of trans-imperial endeavors in Brazil. Linking Euro-
pean ethnographic and scientific expeditions of the nineteenth century
to the Fordist project of plantation building in the early twentieth century,
Yamashita also connects these imperial traces to the more contemporary
moment of post-Fordist global capitalism in Latin America. In this way,
Yamashita’s transformation of the Amazon rainforest into a speculative
space unearths the historical layers of European and U.S. claims to Brazil-
ian natural resources. More generally, Yamashita takes issue with the his-
torical and continued scientific exploration of the Amazon under banners
of benevolent research but through the perpetuation of tropicalist stereo-
types of “jungle nations.”
Yamashita’s description of the inevitable collapse of the industries that
profited off the Matacão mimics the historical decline and ultimate failure
of Fordlándia and, indeed, most U.S. and British endeavors to cultivate rub-
ber on a large scale in the Amazon. In his history of U.S. ecological degra-
dation of the tropics, Richard Tucker explains that capitalist greed spawned
growth of rubber trees in overly concentrated plantations, which ultimately
resulted in massive leaf blight.37 Unable to control the spread of the fun-
gus, the corporate rubber plantations stubbornly held to densely populated
planting techniques because “intensification of production . . . became a
hallmark of the industry and one of the most dramatic triumphs of tropi-
cal agronomy.”38 In this sense, the failure of Fordlándia precisely demon-
strated the deleterious effects of intensified accumulation of global capital-
ism. The rubber cultivation process could have been, and had already been
for many years, a renewable resource extraction. The more ecologically re-
spectful methods were primarily used by local Brazilian seringueiros. Global
capitalism not only severely altered the ecology of Amazonia, but it also in
effect displaced Brazilian workers who had been supporting their own lives
by cultivating rubber in a more sustainable way.
What the Fordlándia propaganda erases in the process of disseminat-
ing narratives of improvement, progress, and development are the stories
of displacement, loss, imposed capitalist greed, and ecological devasta-
tion that Yamashita’s tale so cleverly resuscitates. Yamashita excavates not
only histories of empire in the rainforest but also unofficial stories that
emerge from the perspective of the displaced and disremembered, such as
her character Mané Pena, who spent his days “wandering the forest like
the others—fishing, tapping rubber and collecting Brazil nuts” before a
“government sort” informed him that his land had been cleared but that
they would send an agronomist to “show [him] how to plant” if he signed
a contract (16). Before “the fires, the chain saws and the government bull-
dozers,” Pena worked as a seringuero and thus depended on the rainforest
for his livelihood until U.S. entrepreneurial interests and European scien-
tific endeavors laid claim to his property, even as they congratulated him,
offered him a contract to sign, and suggested that he “get some barbed
wire, fence [his land] in properly” (16). Yamashita describes one of the cen-
tral contradictions of global development policy, which seems to transform
land into designated property only to dispossess its denizens of it, bestow-
ing rights on Pena only to then impose capitalism’s right to reap the bene-
fits of property once it is deemed as such. From Pena’s perspective, the gov-
ernment seized and destroyed his land even as they pretended to extend
the rights of ownership and the sense that they were doing him a favor.
Pena’s story serves as a cautionary counterpoint to the maverick eco-
nomic theories of Hernando de Soto, who believes that lack of formal prop-
erty rights is the source of poverty in the Global South. Named by Forbes
magazine as “one of 15 innovators who will re-invent your future,”39 de
Soto has called the extralegal shacks, stalls, and plots of the poor “dead
capital,” existing beyond the rule of law.40 In his 1986 book The Other Path,
de Soto explains: “They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds;
businesses but not statutes of incorporation.”41 De Soto advocates a devel-
opment model that Third World economies can follow to turn a profit on
a new accounting of territorial assets that have heretofore gone unrecog-
nized as sites of potential, “enabling tens of millions of poor entrepreneurs
across the third world to become part of the system rather than excluded
by bureaucracy and red tape.”42 By identifying untapped sites of growth, de
Soto’s model pulls the poor and stateless into the fold of capitalism, magi-
cally infusing their land with new titles. By apparently adding $9.2 billion
worth of new assets to the system, de Soto’s plan writes the dispossessed
into a global capitalist future. Yamashita’s tale quickly points to the dev-
astating effects of Pena’s property being “liberated” from obscurity: “The
agronomist never did come, but the rains did and the wind and the harsh
46 - CHAPTER 1
uncompromising tropical sun. Even Mané’s mud-and-thatch house was
eventually washed away” (16). The rainforest forcefully rejects the devel-
opment model. As the failure of Ford’s rubber plantation demonstrated his-
torically, the dense planting of rubber trees on such a clearing is a terrible
idea—one that the agronomist’s analysis would only have reinforced. Ford
would replace the local mud-and-thatch houses of the rainforest denizens,
but Yamashita clearly suggests that such domiciles could withstand all but
the most uncompromising conditions of rainforest climate.
The story of Pena illuminates how development and discovery are both
embedded in settler colonialist logics of laying claim to land through capi-
talist constructs of property deeds, proofs of ownership, and legal con-
tracts. In Yamashita’s revisionist tale, it is Pena who discovered and even
named the subterranean resource of the Matacão long before any scientists
when, years earlier, he told tv reporters who had come to film a documen-
tary on poverty in the Amazon “about the underground matacão, or solid
plate of rock that always blocked well-diggers” (17). However, because the
reporters “were used to interviewing illiterate, backward and superstitious
people,” the record of Pena’s discovery was filed away as “fantastico” and
“collect[ed] dust until the late 1990s” (17). The documentary film, a genre
that continues to mediate the First World’s view of the rainforest, fore-
shadows the mercenary interest in the Amazon. The Matacão fails to make
the news as an odd substrate that prevents indigenous farmers from dig-
ging wells and producing enough manioc crops for survival and only makes
headlines when it becomes identified as a potential resource to exploit. The
documentation of truths is a process limited by the producers’ primitivist
outlook on the Amazon and their understanding of indigenous stories as
disposable footage. When it is eventually “discovered” that the Matacão is
manmade and not natural, almost everyone is surprised; however, “that
the primeval forest was not primeval was hardly news to old Mané” (17).
What’s old and what’s news, what’s artificial and what’s of the earth, Yama-
shita seems to suggest, is a matter of perspective.
Considering the disastrous history of Ford’s rubber plantation in the
Amazon, the post-Fordist capers of Through the Arc’s Matacão are hardly
surprising. Chicolándia’s demise is foreshadowed by Fordlándia’s overly
zealous attempts at extracting the Amazon’s resources. Yet Chicolándia
also serves as a referent for another compulsion of empire: to preserve its
version of history by fixing that narrative in time. Described as a “paradise
of plastic delights” (168), Chicolándia’s main attractions are the lifelike rep-
licas of Gilberto’s favorite Hollywood film sets and of famous cityscapes of
the world. At any given moment Gilberto “could suddenly be somewhere
else in time and space” (168). It is a theme park, not unlike Disneyland or
Universal Studios, that seeks to replicate Hollywood. It is also a bit like
Greenfield Village, a historic theme park located in a Detroit suburb called
Dearborn, Michigan, that is dedicated to the preservation of pre-Fordist
modes of production (which Ford was convinced would disappear once his
assembly line and new technologies of industrial production proliferated).
Greenfield Village’s buildings are either transplantations of original homes
and structures or they are exact replicas. The freed slave farmhouses and
artisanal glass-blowing workshops mark a change in modes of production
and participate in a historical narrative that distinguishes Fordism from
an earlier capitalist system that relied on chattel slavery and plantation
labor, even as it stages its reproduction. Much of the official, company-
recorded history of Fordlándia resides in the Benson Ford Research Cen-
ter, part of the sprawling complex of Ford-related attractions in Dearborn.
Yamashita’s excavation of Fordlándia suggests a continuity between Ford’s
twentieth-century automobile assembly lines and forms of exploitation
and indentured servitude physically occurring outside of, but nevertheless
closely tied to, U.S. industry. Even as the Ford Motor Company sought to
separate itself from the plantation, it was actively establishing itself as an
“empire-building corporation” with colonial holdings in both Brazil and
South Africa.43 As LaRue’s scouting report reveals, Ford’s speculations in
Brazil relied on European colonial formulations held over from the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries.
Through the Arc intervenes in and disrupts such imperialist fantasies of
a jungle perpetually uninhabited and virginal, unruly and in need of out-
side regulation, and ripe and available for development. It was never pri-
meval, nor was capitalism’s various intrusions into it ever really new. Both
the fantasy of the rainforest as untapped and the promise of new capitalist
technologies to bring it under the yoke of order get recycled at the colonial
moment of encounter, the Fordist neoplantation, and Tweep’s global entre-
preneurialism. One way Through the Arc undermines settler colonial fanta-
sies of a primordial rainforest of primitive peoples is to undercut Tweep’s
speculative projections on the Amazon with a Native perspective. Yama-
shita asks us to compare Tweep’s view of the Matacão with that of Pena.
Despite being mocked and dismissed as a dreamer, Pena understands a
lived experience of the Amazon’s magic that turns out to be quite real. In
48 - CHAPTER 1
contrast, Tweep, despite exerting dominion over that speculative space,
sees only his own fixed imaginary of the Amazon as an endlessly exploitable
resource. As a consummate proponent of globalization, Tweep depends on
the abstraction of the jungle to make it available for resource extraction. By
including the story of an indigenous inhabitant of the Matacão, Yamashita
allows Pena’s memories of that place to serve as a counter-cartography of
the Amazon.44 Similarly, Through the Arc does not aspire to realism—or
even scientific fiction—but prefers to revel in the disjuncture between the
fantasies of global capitalism that imagine the jungle as primitive and the
magical healing powers of Pena’s feathers. This playful juxtaposition of fic-
titious capital and mystical commodities suggests that capitalism’s reliance
on fantastical representations of space and time is itself a kind of science
fiction.
Yamashita’s excavation and fabulation of the Matacão demonstrates how
a place can be both real and imagined at the same time. The rainforest is
a space that is produced through the ways in which it is perceived, con-
ceived, and lived. At once a cautionary tale of deforestation, exploitative
labor practices, and abusive extraction of natural resources on the part
of an avaricious First World capitalist machine, Through the Arc interro-
gates the narratives spawned from empire’s deployment of scientific dis-
courses about progress and development. By rearticulating the science
fiction trope of alien invasion as a resurfacing of disavowed, domestic de-
tritus, and by excavating the histories of exploitation buried under tropi-
calist constructions of untamed jungles and primitive geographies, Yama-
shita’s speculations provide an alternative to the practices of forgetting that
help perpetuate imperialist endeavors. She interrupts the ongoing project
of transforming Latin America by suggesting that the so-called developing
world has always already been in a state of transformation.
Conclusion
Researching this chapter involved spending some time in and around
Detroit, where one does not have to look hard for evidence of the history
of the auto industry and its participation in a racial capitalism. While I
was digging up files about Fordlándia, I could not help thinking about
Vincent Chin and his violent murder in 1982 at the hands of disgruntled
auto workers who arguably targeted the twenty-seven-year-old Chinese
American engineer as a racialized sign of the threat of the competing Japa-
nese auto industry, which was perceived as the cause of pervasive layoffs
and increased pressures at work. Insofar as Chin’s murder is a story about
racial violence in the moment of global restructuring of the auto industry,
the event is worth revisiting in the additional contexts of the financializa-
tion of the Japanese economy in the 1980s as well as Detroit’s earlier con-
nections to global movements of capital, people, and goods. Chin’s murder
occupies a place in a broader history of racial capitalism that violently de-
stroys that which stands in its way. In my analysis of Through the Arc, I have
examined how European colonial science provided a racialized discourse
of tropicalization that facilitated U.S. neocolonial plantation-building in
Brazil. I have argued that the Fordist rhetoric of improving and civilizing
the Amazon built on earlier established colonial discourses. Furthermore,
I have demonstrated how Ford’s ideas on race drew on eugenicist hierar-
chies that compared Brazilian, mixed-race laborers with Asian workers to
the extent that those ideas informed his decision to establish his rubber
empire in South America rather than in Southeast Asia. Finally, I have as-
serted Yamashita’s work as a counter-speculation that uses the genre of sci-
ence fiction to excavate these layered legacies of imperial projects in the
Amazon. To conclude this chapter, I would like to return to the broader
questions of financial speculation and speculative fiction as competing nar-
ratives of futurity.
Yamashita’s novel addresses the spaces of both the Global North and the
Global South, with particular attention to those parts of the Global North
embedded in the Global South. Through the Arc represents both transna-
tional business elites who move between the United States and Europe
and the dispossessed undercommons who occupy the spaces of the rain-
forest and the favela. By returning to the imbricated labor histories of
Asian Americans and Latinos as well as the displacement of indigenous
peoples from the Amazon, Yamashita’s speculative fiction also performs a
more transnational set of futures. Adopting a Latin American framework
to consider North-South dynamics that move beyond narratives that posi-
tion the East only in relationship to the West, Through the Arc sets up some
of the transpacific migrations that challenge the United States as the cen-
tral vantage point from which to form speculative globalities. In the next
chapter, I examine Yamashita’s third novel, Tropic of Orange, which turns
its attention to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as another space where mi-
grant futures might form a horizon that experiments with the flexibility of
global capitalism.
50 - CHAPTER 1
2
HOMELAND FUTURITY
Speculations at the Border
I’ve got the future in my throat.

—G U I L L E R M O G Ó M E Z-P E Ñ A , “Border Brujo”
Capitalism, having already found a way to turn a profit on disaster, also at-
tempts to harness the energy of forecasting and preempting it. In 2007, the
year in which Naomi Klein’s book on disaster capitalism was published, a
group called sigma—comprised of science fiction writers Arlan Andrews,
Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Sage Walker—traveled to a
Department of Homeland Security conference at the government’s invita-
tion. Formed in the late 1990s, sigma organized itself around the motto
“Science Fiction in the National Interest.” When asked why the Depart-
ment of Defense had included a group of science fiction writers in its
military strategy planning meeting, a spokesperson explained: “We need
to look everywhere for ideas, and science fiction writers clearly inform
the debate.”1 By including sigma in policy-building conversations about
border security, airport screenings, and antiterrorist strategies, the U.S.
government actively recruited science fiction writers to help produce a
near-future national imaginary. Speculating on potential threats at the U.S.-
Mexico border or in cyberspace on behalf of the Department of Homeland
Security, these fictional world-smiths collaborated with policy makers in
producing border futurities that, when operationalized, cohere not only in
the rhetoric of regulation and securitization but also the military and eco-
nomic structures that actualize fantasies of nation, homeland, and threat.
This chapter examines such speculations at the border, where science fic-
tional narratives proliferate from within a military-industrial complex to
form a security-defense imaginary constructed through scenario-based ex-
ercises, video games, and surveillance scan projections.
sigma’s collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security fol-
lows a more general turn in military strategy toward preemptive think-
ing that manifests first as scenario thinking during the atomic era of the
mid-twentieth century and later, in the post-9/11 moment, as full-blown
“scenario-based exercises,” with Hollywood-scale budgets.2 In his analysis
of scenario-based exercises, Andrew Lakoff characterizes this new phase
of defense strategy as “imaginative enactment,”3 stopping just short of con-
necting these scenarios and the work of science fiction more forcefully. In
his account of the affective qualities evoked by Dark Winter—the small-
pox attack simulation staged at Andrews Air Force Base in 2001—Lakoff
emphasizes the feeling that viewers needed to be forewarned of its simili-
tude to reality, lest they be accidentally tricked into believing the training
exercise was an actual emergency. He quotes the director of the Center
for Strategic and International Studies telling Representative Christopher
Shays: “Let me also emphasize, sir, this is a simulation. This had frighten-
ing qualities of being real, as a matter of fact too real. And because we have
television cameras here broadcasting, we want to tell everyone, this did not
happen, it was a simulation. But, it had such realism, and we are going to
try to show you the sense of realism that came from that today.”4
As with Orson Welles’s powerfully convincing dramatic radio perfor-
mance of War of the Worlds in 1938, the recounting of a possible threat—
the imaginative enactment of an emergency—provoked disquieting states
of uncertainty.5 Dark Winter made congressional leaders feel as though
they’d been “in the middle of a movie.”6 Lakoff makes the case that Dark
Winter was “successful in that it convinced participants—and later brief-
ing audiences—of the urgent need to plan for a bioattack.”7 The fiction of
disaster became pivotal in catalyzing a system of emergency management.
Preemption, as Patricia Dunmire has argued, moves rhetorical and ideo-
52 - CHAPTER 2
logical futurity into policy during George W. Bush’s presidency in part by
“reifying the ‘threat.’”8
The emergency simulation, according to Jean Baudrillard, constitutes
science fiction that has “lost its charm” because it has lost its ability to play
on the doubling of real and unreal.9 In these forms of speculative narration
yoked to the military-industrial complex and the policy-producing bodies
of the state (“science fiction in the national interest”), the play of potenti-
ality caves to the predictive pressures of securitization. In the case of Dark
Winter, the “broader lesson was the need to imaginatively enact the event
in order to adequately plan for it.”10 Witness here the quick conversion of
imagination into management. The plan is not only inadequate, it is tau-
tological—producing the very crisis it seeks to contain. Crisis simulation
is self-fulfilling because it inevitably calls for increased securitization, an-
ticipating and fomenting uncertainty all at once.11 Imagination for the sake
of planning, rather than the sake of open-ended potentiality, skips the ini-
tial question of whether increased militarization and capitalization should
be the primary approach to the border or whether there is an alternative
understanding of how (and on behalf of whom) the border might be con-
figured. Such speculative narratives inform, produce, and sustain the secu-
rity state precisely through states of insecurity.12 The methodology of the
speculative security state is one of anticipation and prediction. It gambles.
As the Department of Homeland Security looks to science fiction au-
thors and their speculations on alien invasion, apocalyptic scenarios, and
uncertain futures, the future emerges as a speculative space where various
narratives compete for influence not only in the allocation of resources
but also in the ideological configuration around homeland defense. sigma
and Dark Winter are just two examples of a fairly pervasive merger be-
tween science fiction and the logics of preemption that have proliferated
under the rising aegis of the security state. There are also science-fiction-
themed video games that are designed and sold to train military forces;
Hollywood blockbuster films about alien invasion that glorify war prac-
tices, while shoring up rationales for more robust homeland defense; and
military tech chat rooms that compare unmanned aerial vehicles to cylons
from the science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica. When these
cultural imaginaries conceptualize risk at the border, they project into that
space forms of securitization that manifest themselves as armed check-
points fortified by surveillance technologies. The task of this chapter is to
look to alternative models for speculating the border.
H O M E L A N D F U T U R I T Y - 53
The U.S.-Mexico borderlands offer a particularly rich site to investigate
narratives of futurity, precisely because border regions have been the test-
ing grounds for so many surveillance and military technologies as well as
rhetorical technologies of U.S. exceptionalism before and after 9/11.13 Risk
and threat are long-term denizens of the borderlands, where nuclear dis-
aster, terrorism-linked drug wars, and even nefarious strains of influenza
seem constantly to press their urgency in the form of crisis.
Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi’s 2004 film, A Day without a Mexican,
is one example of a speculative fiction that provides an ironic engagement
with the rhetoric of emergency and apocalypse. Imagining the systemic
breakdown of the U.S. capitalist engine in the face of the disappearance of
its immigrant workforce, A Day without a Mexican shifts the site of emer-
gency from the xenophobic imaginary of barbarians at the gate to the negli-
gence of immigrant laborers’ rights. Arizmendi calls her project “emergency
filmmaking” in that it responds to a series of legislative moves in Califor-
nia such as Proposition 187 and the Sensenbrenner Bill that were designed
to place harsher restrictions on immigration and migrant laborers’ rights
to health care, social services, and public education.14 The film’s tagline—
“On May 14, there will be no Mexicans in California”—provided inspira-
tion for the student and worker walkouts in the spring of 2006 to protest
anti-immigration legislation in the United States. May 1st Movement orga-
nizers adopted the science fiction premise of Arau and Arizmendi’s film
by naming the day of the walkouts “A Day without Immigrants.” Both the
science fiction film and the grassroots movement featured the sudden dis-
appearance of large groups of U.S. workers—disappearances that held an
especially chilling resonance with the ongoing disappearances of women
working in the maquiladora system and the daily disappearances of mi-
grant laborers who attempt the perilous crossing of an increasingly milita-
rized border.
A Day without a Mexican joins other speculative fictions that use the con-
ventional science fiction trope of alien abduction to highlight capitalism’s
reliance on racialized labor. In Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders” (1992),
aliens come to earth seeking to trade enough gold to end all international
debt and enough technology to end global warming—in exchange for all
the people of African descent on the planet.15 The abduction of low-wage
and slave laborers also has catastrophic consequences in a 1965 play by
Douglas Turner Ward titled Day of Absence, which speculates on what would
happen if people of color spontaneously disappeared from the workforce.
54 - CHAPTER 2
These revisions of end-of-the-world narratives by African American and
Chicano cultural producers creatively retool science fictions of emergency
and disaster to protest anti-immigration legislation and unfair labor prac-
tices.16 Such speculative responses to other fictions of crisis make impor-
tant interventions into the ways in which national and international emer-
gencies animate these discursive and ideological cultural contestations.
Several more recent science fictions reconfigure how we imagine the
U.S.-Mexico borderlands, including Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita’s
novel, Lunar Braceros, and ongoing media projects such as the Transborder
Immigrant Tool of the Electronic Disturbance Theater group.17 Both look
to the repurposing of technological tools to cultivate transnational coali-
tions rather than militarized securitization.
The two speculative texts I use to reimagine border futures in this chap-
ter are Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997) and Alex Rivera’s
film Sleep Dealer (2008). These works experiment with the horizon and
the network as two relational structures that reconfigure migrant futurity
around a transnational commons rather than a securitized homeland. Both
texts also maintain a critical distance from techno-utopianism, wary of its
already having been incorporated into a development discourse.18
Yamashita’s and Rivera’s considerations of border technologies in-
clude not only neoliberal technologies such as free-trade policies and anti-
immigration legislation, but also the mechanisms of the surveillance state
and newly mobilized discourses of preemption, threat, and risk. This pair-
ing of texts illuminates the eternal flexibility of the border in its ability
to maintain a stark unevenness between flows of bios and capital. Rather
than depicting the borderlands as a site in need of increased regulation and
containment through restrictive technologies, Tropic of Orange carefully
revamps the borderlands as a geography already populated with techno-
cultural agents working across diasporic networks. The transborder and
cross-ethnic collaborations among characters in both works facilitate the
undoing of global capital’s border speculations. Multinational corporations
suffer backlash from mutant environmental agents, corrupt governmental
institutions collapse under the pressure of their own contradictory logics,
and grassroots transnational futurities emerge. Ultimately, both narratives
work to dismantle what Donald Pease has called the “symbolic drama” of
the homeland, through which promises of protection and warnings of im-
minent threat reconstitute the political body of “the people” into a bio-
politicized population.19 By shifting the site of emergency, Tropic of Orange
and Sleep Dealer invite us to interrogate for whom the future is secured, and
the answer resounds in these dystopian landscapes wherein human well-
being has been superseded by capitalist interest.
Migrant Oranges: The Fruits, Labors, and

Technologies of the Borderlands
In the introduction to The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture,
Amy Kaplan writes: “The idea of the nation as home . . . is inextricable
from the political, economic and cultural movements of empire, move-
ments that both erect and unsettle the ever-shifting boundaries between
the domestic and the foreign, between ‘at home’ and ‘abroad.’”20 Kaplan
opens her analysis of U.S. imperialism with an examination of the Downes v.
Bidwell case of 1901, highlighting the discursive acrobatics involved in de-
termining whether shipping oranges from Puerto Rico to the United States
mainland should be taxed as a foreign or domestic exchange of goods. To
support its ruling that Puerto Rican exports to the United States should
indeed be subject to overseas taxation, the Supreme Court characterized
Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States as “‘foreign’ in the ‘domes-
tic sense.’”21 This flexible and slippery status points to a long and ongoing
history of elaborate equivocations around the rhetoric of U.S. neocolonial
projects in Latin America and Asia, regions connected not only by eco-
nomic systems, migration patterns, and military interests, but also by sub-
marine and outer-space superstructures of communication technologies.
Even as it seeks to deny sovereignty to Puerto Rico as a separate, distinct
state, the United States simultaneously must produce differences between
home and abroad through flexible rhetorical strategies such as those exer-
cised in Downes v. Bidwell.
Written in the context of the War on Drugs, first declared by President
Ronald Reagan in 1984, Tropic of Orange traces the connections among
the culture wars, narratives of race conflict surrounding the Los Angeles
riots of 1992, and the national acceleration toward neoliberalism, culmi-
nating in the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agree-
ment (nafta) in 1994. Beginning in Mazatlán, México, Yamashita’s Tropic
of Orange tracks the northward migration of the Tropic of Cancer. A geo-
graphical marking rendered more legible in Yamashita’s speculative fiction.
As the Tropic of Cancer takes on material form as a translucent and resil-
ient filament running through an orange growing around it, the movement
56 - CHAPTER 2
of that orange causes a physical disruption of space that intensifies the
ramifications of both natural and manufactured borders on peoples and na-
tions. As the “Tropic of Orange” moves north toward Los Angeles, it com-
presses longitudinal space, pressing otherwise disparate groups and events
into closer proximity. Seven fragmented yet coalescing points of view nar-
rate the effects of this time-space compression and, interwoven throughout
the text, provide multiple, imbricated accounts of flexible accumulation
that relies on flexible borders.22 Over the course of the story, other oranges
(such as Agent Orange, O. J. Simpson, and narcocitrus) also come to light,
allowing Yamashita to revisit particularly dramatic examples of neoliberal
practices that demonstrate how discourses of liberal multiculturalism col-
lide with nativist rhetoric invoked to maintain inconsistent regulation of
traffics across borders.
In Tropic of Orange the movement that Kaplan describes of “the evershift-
ing boundaries between the domestic and the foreign” takes shape quite lit-
erally in the journey of the migrant orange. As the novel’s geographical set-
ting shifts northward to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, its temporal location
of the early 1990s urges the reader to connect Tropic of Orange’s spectacular
events with anti-immigration legislation, pluralistic multiculturalism, U.S.
neoliberalism in the form of nafta, and the militarization of the border,
all of which function as technologies of the border. Tropic of Orange explores
several alternative, strategic appropriations of technologies to reconfigure
border operations to quite different ends. Yamashita uses speculative fic-
tion to draw connections between and comment on the histories of empire
and technology that continue to shape the material reality of the border.
Beyond the coincidence of oranges playing such pivotal roles in both
Yamashita’s and Kaplan’s texts, reading Tropic of Orange and Anarchy of Em-
pire alongside one another provides a helpful framework for discussing
the trafficking of goods and laborers across borders and noting the flexible
ways in which the border incorporates some things as domestic and ren-
ders others alien. In the construction, regulation, negotiation, and renego-
tiation of the border, multiple technologies come into play. While devices
and machinery used for U.S. military and police regulation of the border
may be the most apparent and well-funded technological manifestations at
the U.S.-Mexico border, their implementation is clearly linked to other bor-
der technologies. For example, many border technologies are tested first
in Iraq and Afghanistan under wartime conditions, a relationship indica-
tive of the militarization of the border zone. Infrared, night vision, and
x-ray scanning comprise a visual culture of surveillance managed by the
military-(techno)industrial complex. In addition, legal infrastructure and
carceral systems work in conjunction with this arsenal of equipment and
become part of the border regulation machine. Beyond these more overt
forms of border technologies, the social and economic policies and legis-
lative acts that fund and support these technological apparatuses provoke
mass migrations to border cities, foster the proliferation of maquiladora
plants along the border, and capitalize on anti-immigration movements
and xenophobic sentiments. As in Kaplan’s example of the Downes v. Bid-
well case, legislative acts, rhetorical strategies, and economic policies par-
ticipate in the conceptualization and reconceptualization of the border.
By calling attention to the concentration of regulatory, managerial, and
biopolitical forces at work, Tropic of Orange underlines the ways in which
disciplinary models have not given way to regulatory ones but in fact find
ways to co-occupy the border.
Quarantine, Paranoia, and Militarization

We are in the habit of discarding those, and that’s what should be done.
—F R A N K Y O U N G , U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner
In March 1989, suspicion over two discolored grapes from Chile caused
the U.S. government to order the destruction and/or quarantine of tens
of thousands of crates of Chilean fruit. The incident arose during a time
when xenophobic reactions to global terrorism had recently been stirred
up in the United States. The bombing of PanAm flight 103 had occurred
in the previous December, and the news media focused their coverage on
emerging concerns in both public and official discourse about security dur-
ing uncertain times in the Middle East.23 The declaration by the Food and
Drug Administration (fda) that the grapes were contaminated and dan-
gerous brought Chilean fruit exports—not only to the United States, but
also to Japan and Canada—to a standstill for about a week, causing thou-
sands of Chilean agricultural workers to lose their jobs and costing the
Chilean economy millions of dollars in revenue for its second-largest ex-
port. The grape scare, now generally perceived as an overreaction on the
part of the fda, nevertheless resulted in “more stringent inspections” at
shipping ports and became the occasion for Commissioner Young to urge
consumers to do their part in the detection of suspicious-looking fruit.24
58 - CHAPTER 2
Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange centers its border queries on a similarly
impounded fruit. “It’s like the Chilean grape thing but bigger,” declares
one character about the government’s rapid crackdown on oranges sus-
pected in the narrative to have been injected with narcotics.25 Picked up
by the media, the “illegal alien orange scare” (141) starts a panic, resulting
in a nationwide hoarding of oranges. Both the Chilean grape scare of 1989
and the War on Oranges in Yamashita’s speculative fiction propagate a risk
discourse that leads to widespread paranoia, calls for more radical screen-
ing methods, and search-and-destroy practices at the border. Unlike the
allegedly cyanide-filled grapes from Chile, Yamashita’s oranges arrive by
truck, and the government is far less successful at containing this particu-
lar kind of threat. Yamashita’s narcotic-filled oranges allude to the failed
War on Drugs of President George H. W. Bush’s administration and its
connection to another pivotal event of 1989: the U.S. invasion of Panama.
“Thus, while official sources often represent the drug problem as a menace
that the state is dedicated to eradicating,” writes Curtis Marez in Drug Wars,
“in recent history drug traffic has just as often served to sustain and repro-
duce state power.”26 Marez also offers compelling evidence of the science
and technology industries’ investment in sustaining the war on drugs: “The
aerospace industry (which supplies drug enforcement planes, helicopters,
and other technology), chemical companies (which produce the poisons
that are dropped on drug fields), and the prison industry directly benefit
from the drug war and hence actively lobby for its continued expansion.”27
Furthermore, drug cartels “are often equipped with extremely high-tech
armaments and other technologies, sometimes more advanced than those
possessed by the police forces working against them.”28
Tropic of Orange is as much a tale about a fruit scare as it is about the para-
noia cultivated around undocumented labor. Written in the wake not only
of nafta but also of the passage of California Proposition 187 in 1994, Tropic
of Orange conjures up tales of border-crossing fruits to interrogate the nativ-
ist sentiment and anti-immigration legislation that were redeployed in the
1990s. Yamashita’s allusions to the Chilean grape scare of 1989 point to the
culture of privatization, manifested in economic policy and anchored in
notions of one’s private responsibility to detect interlopers. After all, Propo-
sition 187, as George Lipsitz explains, “required private citizens to become
government informants, ordering doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers,
and other state employees to report to immigration authorities all persons
‘suspected’ of living in the United States without proper documentation.”29
Citizens were no longer being asked to discard suspicious-looking, mushy
grapes but to deport and “deliver excruciating pain and punishment to un-
documented workers and their families.”30 The 1990s witnessed a particu-
larly powerful wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation, especially
in California. Two years after Proposition 187, California Proposition 209
passed, setting the pace elsewhere for similar efforts to eradicate affirma-
tive action at the state level. This period also gave rise to a noticeable milita-
rization of the U.S.-Mexico border.31 Operation Blockade/Hold the Line in
El Paso, Texas, in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, California,
in 1994 became models for intensification of border regulation and polic-
ing that gained even more momentum after the events of 9/11.
Propositions 187 and 209 built on an already well-established base of
nativist rhetoric. The two-headed beast of anti-immigration legislation
and neoliberal trade agreements yields a contradiction in border fictions.
Anti-immigration sentiment works in conjunction with nafta’s effects on
Mexican agriculture: workers are displaced by rapid importation of goods
from the United States because local farmers cannot compete with post-
nafta prices. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo calls this nafta’s “fictions of
development.”32 “nafta,” she writes, “was promulgated under the opera-
tive fiction that territorial borders could be porous to goods and capital
but closed to those laborers whose impoverishment is often the result of
nafta-style development.”33
By investigating the multiple oranges of the novel, I suggest that Yama-
shita links U.S. imperialist projects in Asia and the Middle East with U.S.
neocolonial enterprises in Mexico by connecting the military technologies
deployed during U.S. wars abroad to surveillance technologies in place at
the U.S.-Mexico border. I argue that Yamashita’s dramatic remapping of
the borderlands occasions a spectacular collision of transpacific and trans-
continental routes in the form of the traffic jam and the stalled semi, and
that each character seizes on everyday media technologies to document the
suddenly visible threads of global capitalism. In defiance of the invisibility
of the women of color who form the majority of the techno-labor force in
Asian and Mexican manufacturing plants, Yamashita offers alternative nar-
ratives about transgressed boundaries, grids of cross-ethnic affiliation, and
technologies of memory that exceed the scope of the nation.
Writing during an onslaught of simultaneous media representations
of racial conflict and liberal multiculturalism in Los Angeles, Yamashita
60 - CHAPTER 2
connects events such as the O. J. Simpson trial, the Rodney King verdict,
and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 with debates about border regulation,
immigration, and nafta. Tropic of Orange uses a rubric of transnational-
ism to question the formulation of multiculturalism and race relations in
the national framework. The mechanism that brings all these interven-
tions into play is that of speculation. Through fantastic revisionist cartog-
raphies, Tropic of Orange dramatically remaps la frontera. By highlighting
transborder technologies such as activist radio channels and online chat
rooms repurposed to conduct sousveillance, or surveillance from below,
Yamashita’s novel also offers productive ways of rethinking speculations at
the border, remapping the uneven terrain of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands,
and rearticulating the homeland through the intertwined labor histories of
Asian and Latino migrant workers in the American Southwest.
The Orange and the Truck

Tropic of Orange deploys two border crossers—the orange and the truck—
that help us examine how these interlinked technologies work to shape
the border. Characterizing the orange as “an immigrant, through and
through,”34 the Nation’s Molly Rauch opens her review of Tropic of Orange
with a condensed history of the orange as a migrant subject, whose trans-
plantation roughly followed the path of empire. Columbus first transported
the citrus fruit to the New World in an effort to stave off scurvy among
his sailors. In an elegant mapping of the orange’s transnational and trans-
oceanic migrations, Rauch explains that oranges once grew in greatest
numbers and varieties in China, and that Columbus’s oranges arrived in
Spain by way of India, along with the spread of Islam. Today, the United
States has become the world’s largest producer of oranges, and the market-
ing of domestic Californian navel oranges and Floridian Valencias elides
the orange’s longer history and attachment to the movements of empire.
Yamashita’s depiction of the orange as a migrant directs attention to its
global peregrinations, including its navigation of U.S. imperialism in Latin
America as perpetrated by the United Fruit Company and the proliferation
of “banana republics” and plantation systems in Guatemala, Honduras, and
Colombia in the mid-twentieth century, for example. To invoke the border
crossing of fruit is to reference a century of U.S. multinational corporations
wreaking economic, environmental, geographical, and political havoc in
Latin America.35 While literary attention to the United States’ tropical em-
pire often gets told through the banana (as in Gabriel García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude), the orange works to tie the history of U.S.
neocolonialism in Latin America to a more global history of migration that
includes routes originating in Asia.
Due in large part to the facile relationship between the federal govern-
ment and private military contractors, George W. Bush’s administration put
into action a high-tech Secure Border Initiative, entailing a “virtual fence”
comprised of interconnected surveillance technologies such as ground sen-
sors, live-feed cameras, unmanned aerial surveillance drones, and a series of
90-foot-tall towers to relay images to Immigration and Naturalization Service
(ins) trucks and command centers. The initiative to build a 700-mile-long
wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, passed by Congress in October 2006, is
one recent implementation of the most literal of border technologies.
Whereas much of the rhetoric surrounding the border wall discussion
revolves around national security, threat of terrorist attack, and “alien in-
vasion,” Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange returns focus to the issue of labor—
most notably: the labor that goes into building walls and other technologies
that regulate border permeability; the labor rendered invisible by neolib-
eral discussions of free trade and unencumbered movement across borders;
and the laborers who must cross the border “illegally” in order to sustain
the contradictory demands for cheap labor on the one hand, and a racially
consolidated national identity on the other. In Tropic of Orange, those who
first perceive the dramatic spatial warping caused by the orange’s migra-
tion north recognize the shift because they are so close to the labor of con-
structing such walls. In this way, global shifts register most palpably for
those employed on the production side of the fence.
When the character Arcangel stops near Mazatlán to help build the
wall demarcating an estate’s property line, he “wondered if it wasn’t a
wall that could conceivably continue east and west forever. Labor for a
lifetime” (149). While an exploitative capitalism might fantasize about an
endless supply of cheap labor that extends east and west forever, dividing
the world into owners from the Global North and workers from the Global
South, Yamashita’s depiction of an endless wall is one of horror from the
perspective of the laborer, to whom that prospect would mean a lifetime
of work. Arcangel’s interface with the ever-extending wall foregrounds a
laborer’s concerns. From this perspective, such an elastic wall represents
an e ternity—a future of never-ending backbreak in the flexible future
rather than a comforting sign of security.
62 - CHAPTER 2
For Rafaela Cortes, a Mexican woman in the domestic employ of a Chi-
cano journalist’s second home in Mazatlán, moving north and crossing the
border constitutes a formidable struggle that seemingly defies even basic
laws of physics. Her destination seems perpetually out of reach, and her
burden of heavy, modern bathroom faucets picked up from the post office
further encumbers her. The bathroom fixtures may be aesthetically pleas-
ing to their owner, Gabriel, but they remind Rafaela primarily of the labor
required of her: “They were modern-looking things with a sort of indus-
trial look, the sort that Gabriel seemed to like. Rafaela was indifferent to its
style. It still had a surface like any other that had to be cleaned” (68). Pur-
chased in and mailed from the United States but “Hecho en México” (made
in Mexico), the faucets serve as a reminder of how commodities flow freely
across the border, manufactured by underpaid workers in Mexico who can
later neither afford to buy the very products they have created nor travel
with such abandon across security checkpoints. Whereas the faucets flow
freely from their site of production in Mexico to their destination in the
United States and then back again to Mexico for installation in a luxury
home, Rafaela’s movement north is contrastingly encumbered by the threat
of rape and the abduction of her child.
Rafaela’s precarious journey crosses the same terrain as female maquila-
dora workers, whose perpetual and unaccounted for disappearances since
the 1980s indicate the ways in which border surveillance technologies, de-
spite ostensibly being designed to render bodies visible, fail to trace certain
subjects. The notorious conditions for female workers in border cities such
as Juárez, Mexico, provide one egregious example of how surveillance tech-
nologies at the border support a system of rendering labor invisible even as
they perpetuate a myth of barbarians at the gate. For the people (primarily
women) whose work involves the production and manufacturing of the
electronic and computer technologies installed at the border, it is unlikely
that these systems of surveillance will in turn work to protect them. The
promises of a better tomorrow or a secure future overlook these women
whose daily lives consist of a series of dangerous presents that constantly
threaten to foreclose the possibilities of futurity.
Yamashita’s speculative fiction critiques these uneven relations to the
future by dismantling the temporal architecture of a progressive narrative.
Instead of advancing relentlessly toward a culminating moment, the plot of
Tropic of Orange dramatically stalls out in the middle of the book; the culmi-
nation of the orange’s journey is the action of coming to a screeching halt:
“A truck with a load of oranges was stalled in the street just at its narrow-
est place. Behind it was a line of cars and trucks and carts filled with pro-
duce, meats—dead and alive—grains, and kitchen utensils, all temporarily
stalled in their progress toward the marketplace” (72).
This bottleneck of transborder flow becomes an opportunity to focus on
the laboring bodies often excised from narratives of free trade. The traffic
jam sets the conditions out of which emerge the impossible heroics of Arc-
angel, a character of epic proportions: “In each hand flashed a large metal
hook. . . . When the cable was in place, Arcangel secured both ends to the
two hooks and drew the hooks through the very skin of his body, through
the strangely scarred lobes at the sides of his torso. He moved slowly for-
ward until the entire contraption was taut, until he was harnessed securely
as an ox to its plough” (73–74).
Arcangel’s pulling the truck to free up traffic and the pulling of the Tropic
of Cancer across the border are speculative acts threaded together with
the enchanted orange. As if inspired by the performance artist Guillermo
Gómez-Peña, Arcangel hooks his body into the body of the eighteen-wheeler,
where the body of the worker is no longer stowed away in the cargo of the
truck but out in the open, making border crossing visible through cyborg
performance.36 At the very moment when one type of transborder tech-
nology has broken down, Yamashita presents her audience with this fan-
tastic deconstruction of the other laboring bodies whose travel across and
existence at the border can be much more perilous.
When Yamashita describes in spectacular and visceral terms the labor
of Arcangel pulling the semi across the border, she reinserts the physicality
of laboring bodies back into the U.S.-Mexico border. Arcangel’s spectacular
labor evokes a feeling of inescapable immanence, enchainment to the ma-
teriality of the body and to the historical past as bound to his experience.
Tethering the human and the truck performs the agential entanglements
of alienated labor and calls forth the question of what it means to matter.
Arcangel’s performance suggests a formulation of labor as it exceeds the
human (he is also an ox, angel, and engine). He is what Gómez-Peña might
call a “border brujo,” a supernatural figuration that invokes the possibility
of a politics that crosses biopolitical and national fields.
Tropic of Orange is more generally a story of entanglements. As Arc-
angel, Bobby, Rafaela, Gabriel, and the novel’s other protagonists discover
how their movements are inextricable from those of the border itself, the
novel renders the space at once palpable and elastic. The human charac-
64 - CHAPTER 2
ters’ cross-border movements become enfolded with not only the border
itself, but also the various national economies and cultural exchanges they
must negotiate to subsist. These entangled movements of peoples, goods,
oranges, trucks, money, and other materials may well be theorized by femi-
nist physicist Karen Barad’s description of quantum dis/continuity and dif-
fraction: “There is no overarching sense of temporality, of continuity, in
place. Each scene diffracts various temporalities within and across the field
of spacetimemattering. Scenes never rest, but are reconfigured within, dis-
persed across, and threaded through one another. The hope is that what
comes across in this dis/jointed movement is a felt sense of différance, of
intra-activity, of agential separability—differentiatings that cut together/
apart—that is the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements.”37
Barad theorizes entanglement at the quantum scale of the electron as
a “way of thinking with and through dis/continuity.”38 Threading Barad’s
description of quantum entanglement through Yamashita’s figuration of a
border-crossing orange provides a provocative reimagining of transborder
movement as a quantum leap: “A cut that is itself cross-cut. . . . A passable
impassability . . . an im-passe (from the Latin a-poria), but one that can’t
contain that which it would hold back . . . a means of getting through,
without getting over, without burrowing through. . . . Identity undone by
a discontinuity at the heart of matter itself.”39 The aesthetics of diffraction
in Yamashita’s novel—the bullets that bend in space, the fence that seems
to extend to the never-ending horizon, the kidnappers who never quite
reach Rafaela in the car, the laboriousness of crossing a street that seems
to distend in the middle—substantiate a reading of the borderlands that
renders discrete notions of homeland and nation impossible. The analogy
has its limits, though, for when one scales up the quantum to the scale of
human organ trafficking, of semis stuck in traffic, the obstinate imperme-
ability of the border pushes the quantum back into the distant horizon as
sheer potentiality.
To examine the inconsistency of border regulation more closely, Yama-
shita tugs at the geographical fabric of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. She
begins this speculative work with the Tropic of Cancer, “a border made
plain by the sun itself, a border one can easily recognize” rather than a bor-
der drawn by “plotting men” (71). Yamashita’s quick pun on “plotting men”
refers to the scheming of imperialist cartographers who, as Mary Louise
Pratt astutely observed, feminized depictions of the New World as a land
that empire had not yet penetrated.40 Rafaela, who is able to perceive the
dramatic shifts that the Tropic of Orange sets in motion, positions herself
as an interpreter of geographies rather than an object of them. Yamashita
rejects the practice of mapping the world onto a sexualized representation
of a woman of color’s body. Instead, Tropic of Orange is a story whose geog-
raphy remains in constant motion, evading the fixating and fetishizing of
the imperialist cartographer. Yamashita also puns on the narrative “plot”
lines that follow unidirectional, linear trajectories to suggest progress and
development. To emphasize the intersectionality and overlapping narra-
tives at work in her novel, she offers alongside a more conventional table
of contents a matrix of “HyperContexts,” in which a list of characters forms
one axis and a set of weekdays forms the other. On this graph, a reader
could plot her own course through the novel, choosing to jump from chap-
ter 4 to chapter 13 to stay with a certain character for a while, or to plot
the points when or where the characters’ movements intersect. The move
from a table of contents to this matrix reconfigures a reader’s relation to
the space-time of the novel. Whereas one might be trained to read from
front to back, the HyperContexts page invites other reading practices and
understandings of movement.
Above all, though, Yamashita’s imagining of these cartographical fila-
ments suggests an elasticity of borders that responds to the constantly
shifting and contested dynamics of social power. In the midst of Arcangel’s
revelatory dream, in which he comes to understand the connection be-
tween the orange and the Tropic of Cancer, he perceives the orange as
“rolling away to a space between ownership and the highway” (71). The
orange, taken from private land in Mexico to the public thoroughfare of a
highway that continues across national borders, provides Yamashita with
the primary plot device through which to explore an imperfect system of
transnational trafficking, where products and labor slip between owners on
conduits that cannot be wholly governed, controlled, or policed, no matter
the lengths state, national, and international regulations go to do so.
In the chapter “The Hour of the Trucks,” these slippery shipments of
commerce and labor are carefully followed and interpreted through Man-
zanar Murakami, a Japanese American who orchestrates and conducts fan-
tastical symphonies from the rumblings of traffic coursing through the con-
crete spaghetti below his perch on a Los Angeles freeway overpass. It is
through Manzanar’s perspective that “the beastly size of semis, garbage
trucks, moving vans, and concrete mixers” takes on the characteristics of
“the largest monsters of the animal kingdom” whose “purpose was to trans-
66 - CHAPTER 2
port the great products of civilization: home and office appliances, steel
beams and turbines, fruits, vegetables, meats, and grain, Coca-Cola and
Sparkletts, Hollywood sets, this fall’s fashions, military hardware, gasoline,
concrete, and garbage. Nothing was more or less important. And it was all
moving here and there, back and forth, from the harbor to the train station
to the highway to the warehouse to the airport to the docking station to
the factory to the dump site” (119–20). Tropic of Orange locates the conflu-
ence of these commercial traffics at a freeway interchange in Los Angeles,
where the scene of trucks in gridlock provides the occasion for Yamashita’s
critique of neoliberal globalization and “free trade” on the freeways.
Early versions of border patrol in Texas first targeted Chinese migrants
hoping to cross the border from Mexico to the U.S. in search of work after
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 came into effect.41 As Claudia Sadowski-
Smith documents, the passing of this anti-Asian legislation first institution-
alized the category of the illegal immigrant in U.S. border discourse.42 The
process of rendering migrants as alien subjects emerged as part of a matrix
of U.S. racializations that sought to manage the variable flows of Asian
and Latino migration at the U.S.-Mexico border during the early twenti-
eth c entury.
Asian American scholars, by reinvigorating attention to Asian migra-
tions to Latin America, have intervened in the understanding of the re-
gion as a historical site of only European colonial encounters. More specifi-
cally, historians such as Julia Camacho, Jason Oliver Chang, Konrad Chang,
Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Erika Lee, and Eleanor Ty, all work on reformulating the
transpacific borderlands. This legacy of Asian immigration to the United
States by way of Latin America is a history that Yamashita addresses in both
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and Tropic of Orange. In the latter, she nar-
rates this set of migrations primarily through the character of Bobby Ngu,
whom she introduces through the voice of a Chicano in Koreatown: “If you
know your Asians, you look at Bobby. You say, that’s Vietnamese. . . . If you
know your Asians. Turns out you’ll be wrong. And you gonna be confused.
Dude speaks Spanish. Comprende? So you figure it’s one of those Japanese
from Peru. Or maybe Korean from Brazil. Or Chinamex. . . . Bobby’s Chi-
nese. Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexi-
can living in Koreatown” (15).
In her description of all the kinds of Asian-Latino migrant that Bobby is
not, Yamashita provides a brief litany of multiple histories of Asian migra-
tion to Latin America. Bobby’s experience of crossing many borders also
shows up in Yamashita’s depiction of his being perpetually in motion: “He
don’t have time to tell stories. Too busy. Never stops. Got only a little time
to sleep even. Always working. Hustling. Moving. . . . Sorts mail nonstop.
Tons of it. Never stops” (16). For his day job, Bobby sorts mail at a large
newspaper. A deft sorter, Bobby navigated his way to the United States
through the cracks of such institutional sorting. In 1975, he and his brother
slipped into a refugee camp in Singapore, where U.S. soldiers presumed
them to be Vietnamese orphans, rendered mute by the war. Interpellated
into a U.S. narrative about Vietnamese refugees, the two boys obtain U.S.
passports and gain overseas passage under the name Ngu (significant be-
cause Bobby’s father sends them off to “start a future all new” [15] when a
U.S.-owned multinational corporation puts their family out of business in
Singapore). Already marked by U.S. empire at multiple points in his mi-
gration to the Americas, Bobby repeatedly encounters the divisions of U.S.
policy: first, when he and his wife, Rafaela Cortes, must negotiate the bor-
der between them; and second, when Bobby must help his cousin cross the
border after being smuggled by boat to Mexico. The story of Bobby, with its
connections to Mexico (by his marriage to Rafaela), the border (through
his task of smuggling his cousin across it), and Asia (in his childhood of
shifting national affiliations), reminds us that the border has always been
shaped by the negotiations of power on multiple fronts.
The filaments that run through the various story lines of Tropic of
Orange constitute a much more intricate account of how the U.S.-Mexico
border comes into being through transnational and multiple border his-
tories. Yamashita connects these narrative strands through technologies
of memory. In one sense, characters communicate with each other across
space, using recording devices, broadcast media, and online community
uplinks. They share experiences of negotiating U.S. empire and racializa-
tions at work both abroad and domestically. In other words, these seven
interwoven narratives connect via material technologies that circumvent
the divisive strategies of the border and by collectively producing a cultural
memory of the borderlands that defies the divisive strategies of U.S. racial
discourse.
The Vietnam War, for example, shapes the conditions of Bobby’s child-
hood and migration to the Americas, and it also looms over the past of Buzz-
worm, an African American Vietnam veteran and self-described “Angel of
Mercy” to his community. Geographically, Bobby and Buzzworm navigate
downtown Los Angeles, Buzzworm beginning his narrative at Jefferson and
68 - CHAPTER 2
Normandie and Bobby starting out from Pico and Union, just on the other
side of the freeway. Also, in a novel about oranges, Vietnam and South Cen-
tral Los Angeles intersect in the shadow of the use of Agent Orange and
the car chase and subsequent trial of O. J. Simpson (highly mediated events
about race and technologies of visibility).43 The specter of war also looms
over the character of Manzanar, whose memory of internment as a Japa-
nese American during World War II is triggered when the Tropic of Orange
crosses his path.
Another cross-racial, technological link Yamashita makes is between
Gabriel Balboa, a newspaper reporter stylized after Chicano activist Rubén
Salazar, and Emi, a Japanese American TV news reporter. When Gabriel
ends up in El Zócalo, Mexico, he uploads genealogies of revolutionaries for
the Zapatista movement, streaming data to Emi in Los Angeles. While in-
vestigating the black-market traders in infant organs threatening Rafaela
and her son Sol, he creates and monitors online newsgroups, which he
calls a “net of loose threads” in which he might catch a bit of information
(246). In his research on drug-infused oranges that incite a panic about
fruit and borders in the United States, Gabriel follows a paper trail of ship-
ments that do not follow “the normal route” but instead move from Brazil
to Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico and then to the United States. He dis-
covers “a bunch of bureaucratic papers to make transactions look legal, to
make the connections fuzzy.” We find ourselves tracing the hidden routes
not just of global oranges but also of hidden labor. “The invisibility of those
who fingered the threads mocked my every move,” Gabriel notes: “I wasn’t
going to get this story right away, but I’d get it eventually. After all, it was
my story.” At first pursuing the story of smuggled produce, he follows the
hidden labor behind the free flow of capital in an era when documentation
for illicit commodities can be easier to manufacture than paperwork for
migrant workers:
International crime cartels with access to satellite tracking devices.
Tracking illegal merchandise in dozens of cities. . . . Conceivably,
there was a villain at the beginning and end of every signal. Mul-
tiple uplinks and downlinks to a constellation of satellites. But who
was tracking all this? The commerce was on the ground; the threads
pulling them around were in the air. . . . The cartel, if that was what
it was, was a big invisible net. If I had a strategy, it would be to get in
there and snarl the net without entangling myself. (247)
Characterized as “truly noir, a neuromancer in dark space,” Gabriel be-
comes a technojournalist, himself linked into networks on the ground and
in the air (245). Like Bobby (mail envoy and Singaporean coyote), Buzz-
worm (radio savant and community organizer), Rafaela (domestic worker
and border crosser), Emi (television news anchor and renegade broad-
caster), and Manzanar (freeway conductor and homeless internment sur-
vivor), Gabriel reports not only on the visible but also the invisible fila-
ments that connect the Americas and the Pacific Rim.
Tropic of Orange offers a counternarrative to the liberal vision of a multi-
cultural Los Angeles that works through rendering labor invisible or at least
abstract and “forgetting” histories of exclusion and racialization.44 Yama-
shita’s retelling of these histories of migration brings together Los Ange-
les’s Asian American, African American, and Mexican American popula-
tions around shared experiences of being crossed by border technologies
and suggests that these populations also have connected histories of citi-
zenship curtailed by a state that reaps the benefits of cheap labor and an
uneven international trade system. In Tropic of Orange, Yamashita con-
nects the primarily lateral transatlantic and transpacific routes of ships
to the transamerican, North-South routes of trucks. Her cartographic re-
configuration situates the history of the U.S.-Mexico border within a more
transnational framework of imperial dynamics, including the traces of
U.S. empire-building in Asia, which occasioned an influx of Chinese, Japa-
nese, and Korean immigrants to both Southern California and Northern
Mexico. Yamashita structures her speculative fiction under this rubric of
intersectionality through her HyperContexts matrix, which makes visible
the conjunctural relations between the geographical locations of Korea-
town, Tijuana, and Singapore and also between the temporal beats of news
reporting, performance art, and palm reading. In Yamashita’s revisionist
cartographies, the borderlands constitute a matrix of hypertextual associa-
tions informed by imbricated histories of alien exclusion acts, internment
and deportation, 1990s anti-immigration policies, and the use of black and
Latino military labor during U.S. wars in Asia, for example. In its fantastic
literalization of a flexible border, its consideration of border politics and
discourse as magically real, and its positing of strategies of remembering
that exceed official narratives of the border, Tropic of Orange deploys specu-
lative fiction itself as a technology.
70 - CHAPTER 2
Dealing in Sleep, Trading in Futures
In “A Visible Border,” the third part of his 2002 series of film shorts titled
the Borders Trilogy, filmmaker and new media artist Alex Rivera investi-
gates surveillance technologies at work at the border, developed by Ameri-
can Science & Engineering, Inc. The entire length of the film is preoccu-
pied with one image, which is at first unintelligible but is eventually
revealed to be the x-ray image of a semi containing a shipment of bananas
and a concealed container of human laborers on their way to the United
States. It is important to note that the opening orientation of the image
is upside-down, purposefully defamiliarizing what viewers will eventually
come to identify as a human head. The eerie, filmy outlines generated by
the x-ray impart a certain ghostly appearance on the image, and the human
bodies pictured are rendered alien and spectral by the transparency of
their bodies. As the camera spirals and simultaneously zooms out from the
image, a voice-over of a market analyst explains the x-ray technologies that
produced it and the occasion for its application. For over a decade, the com-
pany called American Science & Engineering has provided the U.S. gov-
ernment with the technology to x-ray trucks crossing the border between
Mexico and the United States with the explicit purpose of separating desir-
able and undesirable subjects. Rivera’s filming of this still image directs our
attention to the ways this policing technology renders certain bodies alien.
Yet his insistence on using new media and film technologies to issue these
critiques is significant. He is unwilling to capitulate the terrain of techno-
cultural production as something that only serves state or capitalist enter-
prises. The spectator must question the mechanisms through which we
come to assimilate subjects into our visual understanding.
Sleep Dealer could be considered the outgrowth of Rivera’s 1997 science
fiction film short Why Cybraceros?, in which the multimedia artist first plays
with the idea of cyborg labor: “all the labor without the worker.”45 Taking
up the cybracero (cyber migrant worker) figure, who can “jack in” and oper-
ate machines remotely from el otro lado (the other side), Rivera’s feature-
length film Sleep Dealer intervenes at a later moment in the neoliberali-
zation of the border, when the maquila industry, a decade or so later, has
firmly implemented nafta in the economic and ecological systems of the
borderlands. By 2008, when the film was released, the ins had been ab-
sorbed into the larger entity of the Department of Homeland Security, and
sigma had already pulled up a chair to its table.
While there are continuities across the border discourses in the late
1980s and early 1990s of risk, terror, and insecurity exemplified by the War
on Drugs and the rhetorical flash points of the War on Terror and post-9/11
anxieties about the border, one significant difference between the two mo-
ments resides in the role of spectacle in producing the conditions of excep-
tion. Spectacle and speculation share etymological derivations from the
Latin spectare, meaning to see or behold. Given the pivotal role that spec-
tacle plays in the formation of a homeland security state, it is perhaps fit-
ting that a post-9/11 critical border speculation such as Rivera’s Sleep Dealer
speaks back to its historical moment through visual culture.
New biometric technologies along the border facilitate the prolifera-
tion of identificatory systems, including passports with radio-frequency
identification tags and facial recognition software at border checkpoints.
The implementation of such technologies in the U.S. risk society acceler-
ates alongside vigilante border militias such as the Minutemen, as well
as myriad police dramas like csi, 24, Person of Interest, and Hawaii Five-O,
which conscript audience members (already conveniently primed by the
“scopic drive” of televisual engagement)46 to become citizen-detectives
taking part in an ongoing battle to secure the homeland through surveil-
lance systems tailored to the amateur user.
Sleep Dealer introduces us to a near-future borderlands, in which the
border itself has been officially closed because technology has supplied the
means to effect a neoliberal fantasy of extracting cheap and disposable labor
from the Global South without those bodies ever crossing the border physi-
cally. Maquiladoras still exist but in the form of “sleep dealers”—vast facto-
ries where workers “jack in” virtually via data port implants called “nodes”
to remote-controlled jobs in the North. The protagonist Memo Cruz makes
his way from his “dry, dusty, disconnected” town in the southern state of
Oaxaca, Mexico to Tijuana where he hopes to find work remotely driving
a cab in London or a high-rise construction robot in San Diego. Though
off-site, this work remains precarious in that electrical surges can leave
plugged-in laborers blind, disabled, or dead. Working hours are not regu-
lated. “Sometimes,” Memo’s opening voice-over discloses, “during long
shifts, we’d hallucinate . . . [and] if you work long enough, you collapse.”
Though node technology has significantly changed the realms of labor
and leisure (nodes also facilitate more direct access to pleasure receptors),
the near-future landscapes of everyday San Diego, Tijuana, and Oaxaca
depicted in the film reflect modest yet notably uneven degrees and areas
72 - CHAPTER 2
of technological change. The shiniest new tech radiates around corporate
interests and military defense—two arenas that find themselves increas-
ingly enmeshed in this future because privatization and remote securiti-
zation feed one another’s needs. Remote-controlled automatic weapons
guard local water sources, and biometric scanners monitor and control
people’s access to work and home. Meanwhile, Tijuana’s infrastructure re-
mains ramshackle: factory workers still occupy makeshift shelters on the
hills surrounding the city, but door latches have given way to biometric
scanning devices. While an army of surveillance cameras and automated
weapons guard the local water supply, Memo gets jumped and robbed
when he goes to an unmonitored back alley to find a coyotek to implant his
black-market nodes.
In these ways, Sleep Dealer demonstrates its preoccupations with the
politics of futurity. The film offers bookend pieces of dialogue to signal this
self-conscious problematic of narrating the future. At the beginning of the
film, Memo helps his father bring water to the family milpa, that ancient
technology of Mayan agriculture where cultivating the right mix of maize,
beans, and squash produces a mostly self-sustaining plot of land. Though
Memo, who is an amateur hacker enthusiast, criticizes his father for not
knowing “the world is bigger than this milpa,” his father explains that the
milpa is an investment in the future. “Is our future a thing of the past?”
he asks Memo. “No. We had a future. You’re standing on it. When they
dammed up the river . . . they cut off our future. You weren’t even born
yet. You don’t know how that felt.” Linking the corporate privatization of
Mexico’s water supply to a colonization of the future, Memo’s Papa hopes
to secure a future by clinging to an agrarian past. The film, though, is care-
ful not to over-romanticize this past, posing instead a critique to organizing
a politics around mythical homelands that get taken up by primitivist ra-
cializations of brown people as naturally closer to an agrarian past. The film
ends with Memo’s concluding voice-over: “But maybe there’s a future for
me here. On the edge of everything. A future with a past. If I connect. And
fight.” The film refuses to relinquish the realm of technology and the world-
ing of futurity to corporate discourses of innovation and science fiction
writers working on behalf of the Department of Defense. Instead, Sleep
Dealer argues for and instantiates the production of alternative futures that
fight against not only obsolescence but also obfuscations of the past that
pave the way for the colonization of the future.
Sleep Dealer brings to bear one pivotal component of critical specula-
tion: transnational collaboration. It is the transborder coalition of Memo
the cybracero, Rudy the Chicano drone pilot, and Luz the online storyteller
that facilitates the eventual takedown of the dam that stole Memo’s father’s
dreams of a future. This team of activists connects through the shared
means of their labor. While working for a sleep dealer requires the physi-
cal transformation of laboring bodies through nodal implants into tissue,
blood, and nervous systems, remote-controlled work also exists north of
the border. Drone pilot Rudy Ramirez, whom we first encounter at the Del
Rio Security Headquarters in San Diego, “works at protecting the assets of
Del Rio Water.” Piloting a drone plane also requires Rudy to obtain nodes,
and in this way, the film marks his labor. Rudy’s first mission sends him to
eliminate a “terrorist target,” which turns out to be Memo’s hacker listen-
ing device in Santa Ana del Río. Facial recognition technology and profil-
ing systems overseeing Rudy’s mission identify Memo’s father as a suspect
terrorist. Rudy obeys his order to kill Memo’s father, and the ensuing com-
punction he feels for his actions sends him searching online for traces of
what he obliterated. The search brings Rudy to Luz, who is a writer selling
her memories of Memo to trunode, “the world’s number 1 memory mar-
ket.” Luz’s creative process also requires her to have nodes, as trunode
invests only in true stories, monitored and regulated through nodes by a
“bio-thentication” process akin to an extreme lie detector test. Rudy ex-
plains his interest in Luz’s stories about Memo by expressing their connec-
tion to remote labor. “It’s interesting to know that he’s a node worker. I’m a
node worker, too,” Rudy says, linking the three protagonists via these con-
nective biotechnologies.
The conditions that bring Memo, Rudy, and Luz to their work also in-
form their future collaboration. Rudy understands his work at the Del Rio
Security Headquarters to be a form of military service. He explains: “My
mom and dad went military, so I’m following in their footsteps.” A Mexican
American born to parents who both served in the U.S. military, Rudy be-
comes part of a longer history of Chicano soldiers who fought in Vietnam
and Korea as one way to secure an education, work, and/or citizenship in
a country that perpetually seeks to evict, deport, or incarcerate Chicanos.
Despite his pride in his family’s military service, it is this state-level contra-
dictory logic of recruiting some while executing others that cannot sustain
itself after Rudy sees someone like his own father in his face-to-face en-
counter with Memo’s father, who has been misidentified as an enemy of
the state.
74 - C H A P T E R 2
We also understand that Luz sells her memories to trunode to pay
down her student loans, which, she is notified, are in severe default. Stu-
dent loans constitute a capitalist infrastructure for financing education;
they instantiate financial speculation in that loans are issued with the ex-
pectation that the student has a lucrative future. The moral bankruptcy
of lending institutions that bank on students not being able to repay their
loans except at exorbitant interest rates shadows Luz’s venture into writing
for trunode. She calls her collection of stories “El Otro Lado del Mundo”
(The other side of the world), a title that announces not only a Third World
perspective but also resonates with the science fiction genre of the film
in which her character appears. Amid this coagulation of various forms of
speculation, Luz’s labor of compiling and curating her memories must also
be understood as speculative in nature. The visualizations of her creative
process reappear across Rivera’s film as well, as if Sleep Dealer itself works
like a trunode story. Sleep Dealer asserts this continuity across Luz’s tru-
node memory collection and the film’s aesthetic choices to enact the prac-
tice of producing futures with pasts.
Sleep Dealer capitalizes on the speculative genre by blurring the distinc-
tion between realism and fantasy, taking on the dreamlike qualities of the
state between waking and sleeping. The dissolves bleed like watercolors, a
seemingly impossible medium for telling the story of the parched, drought-
enforced landscape Mexico has become in this future where multinational
corporations based in the United States have privatized and militarized the
regulation of water through a system of dams and aqueducts.
The hacker sensibility that emerges from the cross-border cooperation
works against state uses of technology, and the cinematography articulates
this contrast between on-the-ground, pedestrian tactics and the more sur-
veillant modality of looking from the top down. In his essay “Walking in
the City,” Michel de Certeau theorizes the difference between, on the one
hand, the vantage point from the top of the World Trade Center, which
offers a god’s-eye view of the city’s ordered grid, and, on the other hand, the
pedestrian acts of the passer-by whose movements position the walker in
constantly changing relation to the surrounding city.47 In Sleep Dealer, the
drone that pursues supposed terrorists and enemies of the state is equipped
with “Fly-Eye Cameras,” and a reality tv show uses these images to articu-
late a narrative about “blowing the hell out of the bad guys.” Rudy, who
flies on behalf of the U.S. military in the service of the Del Rio Water Cor-
poration, has the ability to “see every angle of the action” through these
cameras, which are enlisted to deliver this flying superhero perspective—
what de Certeau calls a “voyeur-god” perspective48—to viewers of the show
drones!
The scene cycles rapidly among several cameras at play. We cut from the
drones! footage to a shot of Memo and his brother watching the show on
their television set in Mexico, to the pilot’s-eye view of the ground from
the drone, to Rudy’s targeting system screen, to a shot of the live audience
silhouetted against a large screen playing the show. The reality tv show in-
vites its at-home audience, including Memo and his brother, to participate
in the spectacle of pursuing and eradicating supposed bad guys. Through
these practices of looking, the drones! audience members occupy a polic-
ing gaze. Even Memo and his brother join Rudy in the cockpit, right up
to the moment when they themselves become part of the show, running
toward their home, which is about to be mistaken as a terrorist threat and
destroyed. As the two brothers race home, they move from the space of
the spectator to the space of the spectacle. At this point, it becomes clear
that Rudy and the television audience cannot possibly see every angle of
the action; theirs is not a perfect or all-seeing vision. The only camera that
follows the brothers on foot as they sprint and stumble across the desert
is Rivera’s camera, which reorients our gaze from that of the voyeur-god-
drone to that which hovers at foot level, where we witness urgency and
helpless haste. From this vantage point—the viewing position of Rivera’s
film—so-called reality has suffered a glaring case of misperception. Memo
may be a hacker to the extent that he has retooled a radio to eavesdrop on
other people’s conversations, but he is an innocuous listener, not a terror-
ist threat.
In an earlier scene, we see that Rivera’s cameras follow Memo and his
father as they wind their way through the dried riverbed canyon to get to
the Del Rio dam. To walk with Memo through the river canyon evacuated
of its water, its local livelihood, and its past is to maintain a stubborn re-
sistance to the Del Rio vision of consolidated water and power, guarded
by guns and security cameras that see in Santa Ana only a blur of desert to
be exploited. As Sleep Dealer bounces between drone cameras and more
pedestrian perspectives, we in turn must come to terms with the ironic fan-
tasy of reality tv and the gritty realism of science fiction film. In drones!
reality helps fabricate the state’s fantasy of risk and terror at the border,
while Sleep Dealer uses science fiction to interrogate the mediated produc-
tion of terror and imminent threat.
76 - CHAPTER 2
Through its cinematographic and narrative interventions, Sleep Dealer
highlights the need for on-the-ground hacker coalitions in lieu of tech-
nology imposed from above. By playing with the dynamics of spectator-
ship throughout the film, Rivera critiques the state’s use of technology,
even as the film itself remains invested in technology as a tool that can be
creatively repurposed. The film disrupts narratives of progress and U.S.
exceptionalism by laying bare the fabricated tensions between reality and
fantasy in the state’s efforts to heighten securitization and the proliferation
of military technologies at the border.
Refusing to relinquish technology as a site under the purview of the
state, science fictions such as Rivera’s Sleep Dealer work to reclaim the ever
important imaginative terrain of speculation, of futurity, so as to contest
the ways in which capitalism has already bought, sold, and parceled the
future into portions of risk to be managed, waves of fear to be stemmed,
and threats of terror to be contained. The notion of “homeland security”
pivots on an imagining of the future that demands the assessment of risk
and projections of threat. Rivera’s science fiction, employing a kind of criti-
cal speculation, provides a useful way to reimagine both homeland and
futurity.
This chapter has focused on the California borderlands by dint of the
two cultural texts that anchor the conversation. However, I want to con-
clude it with the broader space-time configuration of the borderlands that
includes Arizona and New Mexico as two more places where science and
fiction collide. Proximate to the U.S.-Mexico border as well as the Isleta,
Laguna, and Sandia Pueblos, U.S. Southwest locations like Albuquerque,
New Mexico constitute what Alex Lubin has called a “transnational cross-
roads,” entangled in “multiple legacies of colonialism.”49 One of these cross-
roads is that of military science and science fiction at sites like Los Alamos
and Area 51, as well as all the nuclear testing sites and waste repositories
in between—which Joseph Masco has named the “nuclear borderlands.”50
Like the Los Angeles basin, the U.S. Southwest also harbors an intense con-
juncture of science, industry, and military interests that generates specula-
tive fictions of the multiple kinds this project engages.
One of the most chillingly iconic sites of science’s collusion with U.S.
military aggression, Los Alamos is a national laboratory installed on behalf
of national security. Operated either entirely or in part by the University of
California since its establishment in 1942, the laboratory represents how
scientific research affiliated with institutions of higher education bumps
up against state and military interests.51 In addition to Los Alamos, New
Mexico—called the Land of Enchantment on its license plates—is also
home to the White Sands Missile Range, where the first testing of the
atomic bomb occurred and when Robert Oppenheimer invoked the Bha-
gavad Gita in saying: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
This meeting of science and myth is amplified at another site in the U.S.
Southwest: Area 51, a tightly guarded, secretive military base in southern
Nevada around which rumors of ufo sightings and conspiracy theories
accumulate with ongoing zeal, fascination, and horror. Protected by one of
the last remnants of the Internal Security Act of 1950 (also known as the
McCarran Act), officials at Area 51, along with those at Guantánamo Bay,
retain the authority to detain and use deadly force on suspicious subjects
crossing its borders. Though much of this McCarthy-era legislation has
been repealed, its legacy of emergency detention clauses was recently re-
suscitated during President George W. Bush’s War on Terror.
I began this chapter with a discussion of sigma and homeland secu-
rity, and I now conclude by connecting Area 51, the science fictions that
surround it, and the McCarren Act’s capitalization on discourses of emer-
gency. These conjunctures of science fiction and national security rely on
discourses of emergency as part of a risk management program designed
to extract profit from projections of an ever-susceptible border. In her
analysis of “shock doctrines” and “disaster capitalism,” Klein provides a
close reading of the document that originally called the Department of
Homeland Security into being. This alarmist text declares: “Today’s terror-
ists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.”52
Designed to incite fear and panic that would provide the occasion to se-
curitize against looming uncertainties—or, as Klein puts it, to protect
against “every imaginable risk in every conceivable place at every possible
time”53—the document invokes a homeland against which it plots a simul-
taneously abstracted and racialized terrorist threat. These border specula-
tions seek to turn a profit on imaginable risks and yoke military mobiliza-
tion and financial speculation in the way the Bush administration “played
the part of the free-spending venture capitalist” in the wake of 9/11 as it
encouraged the proliferation of security-oriented lobbying firms—whose
numbers grew from 2 in 2001 to 543 in 2006.54 The preemptive logics that
undergird financial derivatives markets also sustain the profitable growth
of the military-tech industry in the name of homeland futurity.
78 - CHAPTER 2
3
S P E C U L AT I O N A N D T H E S P E C U L U M
Surrogations of Futurity
An image from the cover story of a November 2008 issue of the New York
Times Magazine instigated a series of debates on the assisted fertility blogo-
sphere.1 The original article about surrogacy, titled “Her Body, My Baby:
My Adventures with a Surrogate Mom,” was written by Alex Kuczynski
and has been characterized as an “unapologetic” and “honest” narrative
of an upper-class white woman’s hiring of a financially struggling surro-
gate mother from Harleysville, Pennsylvania.2 The story and accompanying
image, which features a well-manicured Kuczynski standing in front of her
well-manicured summer home and lawn in the Hamptons, received more
than four hundred comments online before the New York Times shut down
the conversation. Kuczynski’s story garnered attention not only because
of her confessional style—she admits that she was “happy to exploit [her]
last few months of nonmotherhood by white-water rafting down Level 10
rapids on the Colorado River, racing down a mountain at 60 miles per
hour at ski-racing camp, drinking bourbon and going to the Super Bowl”—
but also because of the double page spread title and image, which posi-
tions Kuczynski holding her blue-eyed son, while the baby’s nurse, Margo
Clements (a woman of color), stands to the side, in a white uniform, eyes
on the child rather than engaging the camera. While clearly not meant
to be the focus of the image, Clements nevertheless remains an impor-
tant part of the story of reproductive labor.3 Though Clements was not the
surrogate mother in this arrangement, she, as the baby’s nurse, enables
Kuczynski’s ability to participate in a privileged lifestyle of leisure activi-
ties and social events. While Kuczynski describes how hiring a surrogate
felt “liberating” from “the burdens of pregnancy,” even after the baby was
born, the political economy that underpinned the surrogacy continues to
run through Kuczynski’s relationship to Clements as nanny.
While the term “reproductive labor,” as formulated by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, and given nuance by feminist scholars like Arlie Hochs
child, sets out to name the often overlooked, gendered division of labor in
the domestic sphere, the case of surrogacy as well as other assisted repro-
ductive technologies that often travel across class and racial differences,
sheds light on reproductive labor in its biopoliticized form. In its twenty-
first-century iteration, reproductive labor must also include new world
orders of fertilization, gestation, and birth. Under the aegis of art, repro-
ductive labor has come to fall on the bodies of poor women from the Global
South in even more biologically entangled ways.
International surrogacy agencies, specializing in connecting affluent
parents on the assisted fertility market with so-called wombs for rent,
have come to roost in Anand, a town in the state of Gujarat, India. The
Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Anand cares for a booming population of
local women pregnant with the children of couples from the United States,
Britain, Taiwan, and Japan. Commercial surrogacy, made legal in India in
2002, remains largely unregulated, though in 2015 the Assisted Repro-
ductive Technology Bill proposed banning foreign intending parents and
restricting surrogacy services to Indian couples, or foreigners married to
Indian citizens. Renamed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill in 2016, this de-
bated piece of legislation will be heading before Indian Parliament as this
book goes to press. If passed, it will ban commercial surrogacy in India and
set a precedent for other countries like Cambodia, where the transnational
surrogacy industry has yielded a high potential for both fast-growing profit
and rampant exploitation.4
The promise of transnational surrogacy—the futures that industry holds
up—must be understood as projections that concatenate from a biopoliti-
cal field already made uneven by histories of empire and exploitation of
laboring brown bodies. Given that one of the promises of cross-racial sur-
80 - CHAPTER 3
rogacy is that a surrogate, no matter what her phenotypical presentation,
will not affect the racial profile of the infant to be delivered, an under-
standing of the racial dynamics of transracial surrogacy needs to consider
the history of antimiscegenation laws and beliefs that racialized imperialist
architectures so often put into place at moments of contact or conquest.
Understanding this history might prove useful in understanding how trans-
national surrogacy arrangements profit from not only a racialized past but
also the potentiality of a racist future.
This chapter focuses its inquiry around the migrant futures that emerge
from the conjuncture of speculative economics and reproductive technolo-
gies—of speculation and the speculum—where the futures markets and
narratives emerging around reproductive technologies exploit the lives of
women of color who have very little recourse to earnings comparable to
what the global fertility market offers them for the renting of their wombs.
Interrogating the connections among personhood, reproduction, labor,
and futurity, I examine the discourses as well as the material transactions
of economic futures as they inform a racialized reproductive futurity.
In addition to the Kuczynski story, other popular media narratives about
transnational surrogacy and assisted reproductive technologies have sur-
faced in the early twenty-first century. Putting the transnational surrogacy
industry in conversation with more domestic discussions about race and
arts, I unpack the popular mediatization of Nadya Suleman’s pregnancy
and birth of octuplets. Referred to in the headlines as “Octomom,” Nadya
Suleman stood at the center of a highly racialized set of public debates
about labor, risk, care, contracts, ownership, and insurance. The racial pro-
duction of Octomom points to a larger story about the racialization of re-
productive futurities, particularly as those narrative futures get delivered
alongside the material asymmetries of the global art market.
These contemporary conditions emerge from a longer history of racial-
ized reproduction under slavery and empire, when the presupposition of
a universal human subject was built around the exclusion and exploitation
of people of color who were denied the rights of liberal humanism. One
cultural text that picks up on this history is the high-profile, Hollywood
film Children of Men (2006). Directed by the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso
Cuarón, Children of Men projects onto the silver screen a dystopian future
in which eighteen years of unexplained infertility has led to a reproduc-
tion crisis. Set in near-future England, the storyline places the burden of
reproduction on the body of a black female refugee named Kee, who is
S P E C U L AT I O N A N D T H E S P E C U L U M - 81
discovered to be pregnant and therefore carrying the future of human-
kind. I investigate what histories haunt this film to unpack the complicated
and sometimes contradictory meanings elicited from Cuarón’s casting of a
black woman in this role—a choice made all the more noticeable because,
in P. D. James’s novel on which the film is based, the main black female
character is the midwife, not the child-bearer herself. I again draw on
Avery Gordon’s formulation of haunting as a “transformative recognition”
to read the “ghostly matters” conjured both purposively and unwittingly in
Cuarón’s film.5 I argue that by forcing our attention on certain background
scenes and emphasizing moments of interruption and disorientation in the
hero’s journey, Cuarón opens a space for critically encountering the appa-
ritions of torture, state-sponsored violence, and surveillance that inhabit
and puncture our experience of the central plot. I also argue, though, that
the film asks us to feel this haunting primarily through the experiences of
a character who, though affected and depressed by the repressive systems
around him, is not directly targeted by them.
Like the Octomom story, Children of Men is a racialized narrative about
reproduction and technology that comes into popular circulation at the be-
ginning of the twenty-first century. While Octomom takes shape as a cul-
tural text through press coverage, tabloid speculations, and online posts
of people’s opinions and comments, Children of Men is a big-budget film
adaptation of James’s dystopian novel, perhaps more overtly connected to
science fiction. The public narrative constructed around Suleman’s birth
of octuplets borrows many of its vocabularies and ideological trappings
from welfare discourses that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Meanwhile, because Cuarón’s Children of Men is based on a novel that was
published in 1992, it indirectly engages the same set of discourses about re-
production and amplifies the stakes by casting Kee as a woman of color. In
both speculative texts, critical questions about reproductive futurity work
across the bodies of women of color whose narratives seem simultaneously
distinct from, supplemental to, and emblematic of a story about reproduc-
tion in a globalizing world extrapolated from the unborn child.
That feels all the more alarming when couched in the terms of specula-
tive futures markets, wherein the mother’s labor would be considered sup-
plemental to the promise of the child’s potential in the economy of human
capital. Nalo Hopkinson’s science fiction novel Midnight Robber (2000)
explores alternative possibilities at the intersection of technology and re-
production by imagining cross-species partnering and queer family forma-
82 - CHAPTER 3
tions. The ex-slave, postapocalyptic societies Hopkinson depicts survive
not through a return to heterosexual reproduction and vigilant adherence
to “family values,” but through the emergence of migrant communities in
which reproductive bodies are queered and dislodged from heteronorma-
tive domesticity. I argue that Hopkinson looks to the future not only with
a wariness about mythologies of technological advancement but also with
a keen attention to how oppressive systems of power reproduce them-
selves—even in processes of decolonization—through social systems that
are shaped by gender hierarchies.
Hopkinson’s revisionist speculations on technocultural origin myths
manifest in Midnight Robber’s efforts to disentangle technology from its
Western cultural codes, offering an alternative future that emerges from
technologies that owe their names and architectures to African folklore
and diasporic histories. By calling into question the narrative of tech-
nology’s origins and even how and what we call “technology,” Hopkinson
challenges Western associations of technology with notions of progress,
modernity, and freedom, which have historically served an ulterior pur-
pose of rationalizing the exploitation of marginalized peoples in the name
of development. In Hopkinson’s words, the paradigms and stories about
technology “shape not only the names for the technology we create, but
the type of technology we create.”6 Hopkinson’s worldings include alter-
native networks that emerge from the interlinked labor histories of black
and Asian people in the Caribbean. An Afro-Caribbean-Canadian writer,
Hopkinson calls for the forging of transnational—or, in this case, inter-
galactic and cross-species—coalitions in times of emergency. My analysis
of queer kinship models and diaspora-inspired technologies in Midnight
Robber also attends to the linkages between queer and diasporic networks
as alternative formulations of belonging and community that extend be-
yond the reproduction of family and nation.
Both Cuarón and Hopkinson produce science fiction technofutures that
critique the technological utopianism and neoliberalism avidly espoused at
the turn of the twenty-first century just as tech companies first falter in the
global economy. In Children of Men, technology does not deliver the future
from poverty, state oppression, discrimination, illness, or death. Rather,
the world suffers from near-total infertility, rampant pollution, and an abu-
sive police state. Cuarón critiques neoliberalism as a contradiction of ide-
ology and policy by portraying a near-future in which the gap between the
First and Third Worlds widens when militarized border technologies work
in conjunction with cultures of individualism to bolster isolationist state
power.
The politics of reproduction and speculations on futures shift signifi-
cantly from Children of Men’s masculinist and nationalist perspectives to
Midnight Robber’s queer, feminist epistemologies. Taking into account
theories of spectatorship and practices of looking, my analysis of Children of
Men explores ways that Cuarón sets out to unravel the suturing of viewer to
protagonist but ultimately cannot sufficiently de-center Theo as the white,
male hero of the film. The film remains fixated on London as the epicenter
of this future world in Children of Men; whereas in Midnight Robber, the
cultural legacies that inform the otherworldly settings we encounter stem
from the multiple and syncretic traditions most often found in the Carib-
bean. Hopkinson’s tale provides a decolonial, feminist argument, warn-
ing against non-intersectional revolutions. The space community of exilic
Trinidadians come to settle on the planet Toussaint, where they largely re-
produce the structures of inequality and subjugation from which they fled.
For the inhabitants of Toussaint, the Afro futurist promise of space travel
does not deliver utopian finitude. What the reader learns from Hopkin-
son’s rerouting of information-age technologies through Afro-Caribbean
lore is that there is no postcolonial future as a destination. The analytics of
diaspora studies help reveal that this speculative novel refuses the teleo-
logical ordering of departure and arrival in immigrant narrative conven-
tions. Rather than arrange her vision of futurity around the promises of a
new world, Hopkinson formulates postcolonial futurity as a continual and
multidimensional mode of becoming.
If citizenship has often been tied to birthplace, it has also persistently
been alienated through processes of racialization. Even in a postgenomic
age, when trafficking in gametes, embryos, and wombs across state lines
might force a reconfiguration or at least a reconsideration of nation-based
citizenship, some might turn to a positivist embrace of technology and a
promissory liberation narrative attached to its fictions. In contrast, science
fictions that imagine technofutures as already mired in and tethered to a
long history of racialized reproduction extend Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s defi-
nition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and ex-
ploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” to the
temporality and scale of the “politics of life itself.”7
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The Speculative Futures of Race, Reproduction, and Citizenship
Deriving from the Latin subrogare, meaning “to appoint to act in the place
of,” surrogacy names an appointment that must at some point articulate
itself in the form of a speculative claim—an enunciation of a future acting
in place of. Surrogation, as Joseph Roach theorizes the concept in relation
to cultural memory, functions as a projective substitution.8 In this sense, it
operates similarly to speculation. Commercial surrogacy has at times been
called colloquially “wombs for rent,” “outsourced pregnancies,” or “baby
farms,” and agencies often orchestrate the legal, financial, and medical ar-
rangements between potential surrogates and intended parents.
The speculative rhetoric of the transnational surrogacy industry, in-
cluding insurance companies and medical tourism agencies, relies on pre-
existing narratives of race and modernity as well as historical practices of
medical experimentation on slave women, incarcerated subjects, and other
subjects rendered invisible to the state.
Genomic databanks and pharmaceutical trials require increasingly
larger pools of people-made-data in order to be profitable. To ensure a
steady and unregulated stream of research subjects, companies in the busi-
ness of trading in biological materials encourage organ, tissue, and blood
donors, including egg donors and surrogate mothers, to “gift” their bio-
matter out of “the goodness” of their hearts, “for the sake of public health,”
“to do their part for the fight against x/y/z disease.” Expectant parents are
advised to bank their newborn’s cord blood as a resource for potential
future health problems.9
In the global surrogacy market, clients from the Global North seek out
surrogate mothers primarily from India and elsewhere in the Global South,
where disparate valuations of life are leveraged to fund the reproductive
ambitions of women of the Global North—whose labors are beholden to
global capitalism differently. One story of transnational surrogacy that
made international headlines in 2008 is that of Manji Yamada, whose “in-
tended parents,” Yuki Yamada and R. Ikufumi Yamada, sought out a surro-
gate mother in Anand who would serve as a gestational carrier for an im-
planted embryo comprised of genetic material from an Indian or Nepali
donor’s egg and Ikufumi Yamada’s sperm. After Manji’s conception and im-
plantation, the Japanese couple got divorced, and Yuki no longer wished to
participate in Manji’s life. Ikufumi now faces the complication of trying to
adopt Manji as a single man—a practice forbidden by Indian law.
In this moment of outsourced reproduction, when wealthy couples
“rent” the wombs of less privileged women; when surrogacy costs about
$12,000 in India versus upwards of $70,000 in the United States, with
surrogate mothers earning perhaps only around $5,000 in India versus
$20,000 in the United States;10 and when contract reproduction remains
illegal in many countries, we might ask what cultural discourses, norms,
and contestations emerge at the conjuncture of reproductive technolo-
gies and reproductive labor? As Kalindi Vora has urged, “since it caters
to clients from wealthier nations, transnational Indian surrogacy requires
us to attend to the political-economics of the global division of reproduc-
tive labor” and reconceptualize surrogate bodies and their relationship to
birth.11
The anxieties and assurances produced around transnational gestational
surrogacy tend to be managed at least in part through the perception of
racial difference. One surrogate mother at the Akanksha clinic explains: “It
won’t even have the same skin color as me, so it won’t be hard to think of it
as Jessica’s.”12 A frequently asked question on multiple in/fertility blogs reg-
isters how intended parents wonder to what extent the baby will be geneti-
cally related to the gestational carrier. As more research points to possible
migrations of fetal and maternal cells across the placental wall (“fetomater-
nal microchimerism”) during pregnancy, the promise of absolute genetic
separation seems untenable. And yet that uncertainty only generates more
instruments for hedging against legal or medical complication. Fertility
financing firms such as CapexMD, New Life Agency, and Prosper Health-
care Lending not only offer fertility loans but also assisted reproduction
insurance. Whose futures are being secured in these transactions? What
are the preexisting circumstances that inform how these transnational ex-
changes get brokered?
One online publication tells the story of a couple from Atlanta. Drew
Miller and his (unnamed) wife published a forty-page booklet available on-
line for $20 via PayPal, “to help us cover the cost of our own ivf costs.”13
Titled ivf and Surrogacy in India, the booklet serves as a guidebook for the
burgeoning reproductive tourism industry. It provides a slew of informa-
tion—from the drug protocols the Millers followed at the Akanksha clinic
to the best hotels to stay in while in Anand—and the Millers market their
booklet as part personal memoir, part medical documentation, and part
tour book. “We’ve also included a map of Anand that includes points of
interest,” the Millers write. “There is a section on things to do in Anand
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where we also discuss the different hotel options, restaurants, shopping
and getting around in Anand.” Transnational surrogacy and international
travel seem entirely enmeshed in the Miller booklet. Furthermore, the fi-
nancial arrangements that facilitate the Millers’ mobility build on credit
they accrue from their status as documented and banked U.S. citizens with
enough liquid capital to make an overseas trip.
Where do we begin to articulate a critical framework for addressing
these circulations of racial ideologies in popular culture alongside the ma-
terial exchanges of actual biomatter across an uneven global economic ter-
rain? What historical contexts help us situate the emergence of racialized
representations of reproductive bodies? How might a comparative ethnic
studies approach help us unpack popular discourses around race and re-
production? And how can we put feminist science and technology studies
frameworks in conversation with important questions arising in critical
globalization studies about women’s labor beyond EuroAmerican contexts?
As the Global South develops new dependencies on U.S. pharmaceutical
companies and medical aid organizations and as reproductive tourism and
other forms of bio-trafficking suggest other manifestations of globalization
on the move, how does a neoliberal model of global restructuring collide
with transnational circulations of commodified bodies?
Nadya Suleman, sometimes referred to as Octomom, gave birth to oc-
tuplets on January 26, 2009. When the news first broke, before any de-
tails about Suleman and the conditions surrounding this reproductive
event were publicized, the blogging and mediated public rehashed a famil-
iar performance of exuberant congratulations, deploying the language of
“miracles” and “blessings.” As conjectures from the medical community
that the octuplets must be a product of assisted reproductive technologies
(art) emerged, though, the narrative shifted in tone, hedging away from
the story of medical triumph and moving toward one of serious complica-
tion and questionable ethics. Simultaneously, questions arose about Sule-
man’s identity and her intentions. Once the press learned that Suleman
was a single mother with six children at home already, the conversation
turned ugly quickly, borrowing from late twentieth-century reproductive
discourses about welfare, overpopulation, and immigration (often imbri-
cated with xenophobic anxieties and racism) to alienate Octomom from
the camp of heteronormative reproduction. As Dana Ain Davis argues, the
uncertainty of Suleman’s class and race frustrated attempts to fit her nar-
rative into a preset social script about reproduction. Rather quickly, Davis
remarks, “‘the miracle’ turned to disgust, which seemed to be fueled in part
by an inability to ‘profile’ the woman who gave birth.”14 In the absence of
these details, a predictably racist set of speculations arose about this single
mother. According to Davis’s research, bloggers associated Suleman’s fe-
cundity first with her being an “illegal alien mom” and later as an Afri-
can American “welfare baby momma.” Suleman’s story puts pressure on
the disjuncture between public assistance and assisted reproductive tech-
nologies. “Assistance,” it would seem, bears wildly different connotations
depending on its issuance as public versus privatized forms of care. That
discussions about reproductive technologies so often get caught up in dis-
courses about race, class, gender, and sexuality exemplifies how cultural
discourses use medical discourses—which so often naturalize differences
based on ethnicity and gender—to manage these discrepancies.
In the words of the nbc reporter Gordon Tokumatsu, “most of what’s
out there [about Suleman’s octuplets’ birth] is just creative speculation.”15
The celebrity news media, members of the medical community, and at-
home online commentators crafted and circulated fictions about the occa-
sion for, circumstances surrounding, and details of this octuplet birth.
These speculative fictions, in turn, play out anxieties about how biological
technologies should be regulated and to whom they should be made avail-
able. The quick turn from miraculous exception to distasteful excess not
only signals the tenacious racialization of reproductive futurity but also
throws into relief the different valences of public and private assistance.
The creative speculations generated around Octomom produced vitu-
perative, venomous threats as well as calls for sometimes violent regula-
tion and policing of reproduction, recalling the kind of eugenicist think-
ing from early twentieth-century reform movements. Critics, who included
self-avowed psychologists, questioned Suleman’s mental “fitness,” asking
whether she had been counseled regarding so-called selective reduction.
Arguments about women not being mentally fit enough to reproduce
worked to sustain sterilization laws in the infamous Supreme Court case
Buck v. Bell in 1927, at the peak of the eugenics movement in the United
States. Whereas Carrie Buck was deemed “feebleminded”16 and thus char-
acterized as a threat to the gene pool and therefore to the health of the
state, discussions about Suleman’s mental fitness more closely resemble
the more “punitive” and more racialized rhetoric used in U.S.-backed ster-
ilization campaigns in Puerto Rico, which combined eugenicist precedents
with xenophobic anxieties about overpopulation.17
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As the dramatized narrative about Suleman and her children continued
to play out on irreverent celebrity news blogs and in tabloid newspapers
and magazines of the same ilk, the story took on increasingly overt ele-
ments of science fiction. Unsettling images eventually emerged that frame
Suleman’s pregnant body as either freakishly alien or as hyperalienated, in
the sense that Octomom became a racialized figure of biological and finan-
cial excesses. The text that accompanied one widely circulated image of
Suleman eight days before her scheduled C-section reads: “Octopussy may
not have to pimp out her wombmates for dollars on her website anymore,
as this ‘Alien’ photo has just landed her a new gig—the poster mom for
anti-in-vitro fertilization.”18 By calling Suleman an “alien,” the staff writer
for tmz cast her story even more concretely into the genre of science fic-
tion, aligning Octomom with the Alien movies, a series that is intensely
riddled with anxieties about maternity in an age of assisted reproductive
technologies and genetic cloning.
Suleman’s very “public pregnancy” instantiates what Anne Balsamo
recognizes as a troubling convergence of reproductive technologies and a
desire to discipline the pregnant body through modes of heightened sur-
veillance.19 Suleman’s case also brings into focus the ways in which media
become reproductive technologies, producing again and again visual and
textual narratives about race and class as they collide with the politics of
reproduction. Some of the most helpful critical frameworks have looked
beyond textual narratives to consider the significant role visual culture
has played in the popular understanding of reproductive technologies. The
Octomom story demonstrates how narratives about race, reproduction,
and technology are speculatively formulated, rewritten, and variously de-
ployed in the news media and blogosphere.
Calling Suleman “alien” also registers another, simultaneous anxiety, di-
rectly related to the spurious claims that she is undocumented. Stamped
as the property of the celebrity and entertainment website tmz.com, the
image consists of two side-by-side photographs—one frontal and one pro-
file view—of Suleman’s very large pregnant belly. This pairing of one front-
view and one side-view photo seems designed to evoke the conventions of
prison mug shots. Marked as “alien” and prisoner in this one image, Sule-
man inhabits the visual space of an alienated citizen. With her shirt pulled
up to reveal her belly, Suleman poses in front of not the blank wall of a
prison booking room but what looks to be a curtain of another institution:
the clinic. In this image, the disciplinary settings of the prison and the hos-
pital are drawn together, and the public discourse about Suleman’s right to
have octuplets becomes inextricably linked to questions about her right to
U.S. citizenship and her implied criminality. Joann Killeen, Suleman’s first
public relations representative, distanced herself from the case once death
threats were issued to both women. Killeen reported to Larry King in an
interview: “They’ve said to me that I should be put down like an old dog, I
should be paralyzed, my client’s uterus should be ripped out, she should be
put on an island . . .”20 The eugenicist impulse to call for Suleman’s compul-
sory sterilization bears a century-old legacy in the United States of cutting
off certain members of the population deemed unfit to reproduce from the
opportunity to do so. The intertwined histories of racism and forced ster-
ilization in the United States reveal how women of color were often told
that their status in relation to immigration, benefits, or housing, might be
compromised if they did not agree to biomedical interventions into their
fertility.21
If homeland futurity, as chapter 2 argues, projects a racialized threat of
alien invasion to bolster arguments for increased militarization of the bor-
der, reproductive futurity not only orients subjects toward a reproductive
imperative, but it also extrapolates from eugenicist rhetoric to ascribe a ge-
netically selective future. These securitizing logics work across the scales
of nation and genetic population in interconnected ways. In the context
of the United States, at least, that connection presents itself most clearly
when the state attempts to regulate racialized populations by controlling
the reproduction of people of color.
Developing a biopolitical theory without decolonial analytics would be
to miss many of the vicissitudes that constitute the contemporary global
market in biomatter. Whereas biopolitics takes up questions of “the sov-
ereign” and “the citizen” via a universal category of the human, the minor
fields of critical ethnic studies, feminist and queer theory, and decolonial
thought foreground histories of slavery, indenture, and empire, wherein
citizenship itself is propped up by systems that produce categories of dis-
avowed nonbeings through which citizenship emerges in contradistinction.
Is it not possible that the politics of life might mean something very differ-
ent for populations whose histories include the rendering of life into non-
being?
With these questions in mind, I turn next to two speculative fictions—
one film and one novel—that use the premise of species-scale reproductive
imperatives to interrogate the racialization of reproductive futurity. Inso-
90 - CHAPTER 3
far as reproduction and labor are interlinked processes, these cultural texts
help illuminate the necessity for an intersectional, and indeed interspecies
approach to the concept of survival. Interrogating the histories of slavery
and eugenics that underpin contemporary racially asymmetrical distri-
butions of life-chances, these cinematic and literary hauntologies situate
how we tell stories about the future, what role reproduction plays in those
stories, and how one might begin to dislodge reproductive futurity from
an equivalence with white heteropatriarchy, or even with the category of
the human.
Whose Future? Technologies of Reproduction

and Representation in Children of Men
Look, I’m absolutely pessimistic about the present. But I’m very optimistic about the
future. I’m a pessimist about the present because I know my generation. But every
time I see younger generations, I’m hopeful. That’s the word. Hope. There you go.
—A L F O N S O C U A R Ó N
Cuarón’s film Children of Men depicts a near-future dystopia in which

humans have been infertile for eighteen years, during which time state
practices of regulating bodies have become increasingly insidious, totali-
tarian, and violent. Set in the United Kingdom of 2027, the film depicts
a world that has witnessed societal collapse, rampant violence, and eco-
logical devastation, in which national governments have crumbled with
the exception of an increasingly authoritarian British state. Propagandist
videos on the subway declare: “Only Britain soldiers on.” Migrants, people
of color, the poor, and the sick are, as always, hardest hit by this national-
ist shift as anti-immigration legislation, military-backed deportation prac-
tices, and state-mandated fertility screening tests create a heavily policed,
xenophobic, and paranoid environment—an environment so rife with pol-
lution and toxic waste as to seem at the end of its life-sustaining capacity.
Against a bleak landscape of religious fanaticism and violent struggles be-
tween ideologically and politically desperate groups, Cuarón’s film remains
invested in the figure of hope embodied by the pregnant African “fugee”
(refugee) named Kee, played by Claire Hope Ashitey, a British actress of
Ghanaian descent. Much of the film’s central action revolves around Kee’s
struggle to reach a group called “the Human Project,” a group of scien-
tists who presumably will not take Kee’s baby to co-opt it for political use
and their own selfish gain. While the film is set in and around London, the
United States looms large in Cuarón’s work. Released in 2006, Cuarón’s pri-
mary narrative unfolds against the haunting backdrop of Abu Ghraib and
other U.S.-backed torture camps, which take the form of refugee detention
centers in the film.22 These detention centers invoke not only the specter
of Nazi concentration camps but also the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico
border. Set to Krzystof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiro-
shima,” these scenes are also haunted by another example of U.S. military
aggression in the form of the nuclear attacks on Japan during World War II.
Children of Men levies a critique against techno-utopianism using similar
strategies as Yamashita’s speculative fictions, which I explored in the pre-
vious chapter. Cuarón presents a future in which technology has not deliv-
ered freedom, equality, and an open society, but rather, quite the opposite.
Furthermore, his vision of the future also investigates various histories of
human rights violations of the past century, including the Holocaust, Japa-
nese internment during World War II, and the proliferation of offshore
military detention facilities under the auspices of a global War on Terror.
Although it seems that from the opening scene, the viewer is sutured
to the main character, Theo (Clive Owen), Cuarón does not always privi-
lege Theo’s perspective, which cannot always compete with the disturbing
images of police violence and social unrest that occupy the unmistakably
dynamic backdrop of the film. To an extent, the camera constantly asks the
viewer to look beyond the plot’s white male protagonist; however, the only
alternative point of view Cuarón offers is perhaps his own, in the form of
a disembodied, wide-shot perspective. But in a film that places the hope
of the world’s future on an expected child, where is the expectant mother?
It is around Kee that the politics of looking become somewhat fraught.
Cuarón overlooks Kee’s perspective in this narrative about reproduction—
a neglect of the mother symptomatic, perhaps, of the plot’s fetishization of
the child as the hope for the future. After all, the title of both the film and
the novel it adapts, names “children” and “men”—with the glaring omis-
sion of mothers.
Cinematically, Children of Men follows the technical style Cuarón em-
ployed in Y Tu Mamá También, in which long, wide-shot takes constantly
frame the characters against an equally detailed and significant environ-
ment. In a film that minimizes close-ups, the sociopolitical landscape be-
comes as much of a character as the individuals. Cuarón experiments with
this technique in Y Tu Mamá También, which offers a resistant narrative
of citizenship embedded in moments of detoured camera movement, in
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which the natural diagetic trajectory of the camera’s gaze gets wrenched
away from its more predictable path to allow for the disruption of distrac-
tion. These distractions often highlight the repressive authoritarian govern-
ment and its subjection of its citizens to a range of policing acts. Whereas
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo understands this oscillation between the
central and the peripheral narrative lines as working to “interrupt the filmic
text,” she also insists on the “interdependence between the peripheral and
the consequential story lines,” at least in the case of Y Tu Mamá También.23
Slavoj Žižek, whose comments on Children of Men appear in the dvd’s extra
features, calls attention to the tension Cuarón cultivates between the fore-
ground and the background. Žižek argues that “the true focus of the film is
there in the background, and it’s crucial to leave it as a background.” Call-
ing this technique a kind of “anamorphosis,” Žižek suggests that “if you
look at the thing too directly—the oppressive, social dimension—you don’t
see it; you can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background.”
The idea of activating the background is quite compelling, as is the poten-
tiality Cuarón, as a Mexican auteur, sees in what the privileged, mobile
subject (in this case, Theo) often overlooks, ignores, or passes by. But to
what extent does a formulation of an anamorphic gaze decenter the white,
male perspective? Theo could easily be characterized as an untrustworthy,
unlikeable antihero. He is a coward, a broken soul, a man who uses the
occasion of public mourning over the death of the youngest human alive
to excuse himself from his dreary, dead-end desk job. Yet from the open-
ing scene of the film, the camera and the narrative follow the emotional
and physical journey of this disaffected, depressed ex-activist. We shadow
Theo as he takes his morning coffee, watches the morning news, and goes
to work. The film tethers us to his annoyance with the public weeping over
the murder of Baby Diego, an eighteen-year-old boy, whose fame comes
from his being the last baby born on earth. Though shaken by the bombing
he has witnessed from feet away, Theo remains an unreliable and unlike-
able protagonist, disconnected from and therefore complicit in the forms
of state repression he passes on his way to work. By the end of the narra-
tive, Theo emerges as a veritable hero, whose purpose has been restored
through a recuperation of his fatherhood and masculinity, and it is this
plot trajectory—still functioning according to a logic of development and
progress—that Cuarón makes an effort to undercut and counterbalance
with the perpetual intrusion of Theo’s environment into his life.
Cuarón’s use of anamorphosis works as a technology of haunting. In
these anamorphic moments, Cuarón reveals a repressive police state,
scenes of torture, and the ghostly specter of the camp. His films seem espe-
cially haunted by the surveillance state as a visual technology that pos-
sibly implicates film but also possibly facilitates the film’s self-conscious
critique of exploitative practices of looking. Children of Men stages a dis-
ruption of Fredric Jameson’s definition of “spectrality” as “what makes the
present waver” to theorize how haunting works: “The emphasis on the
wavering present, on the propinquity of hard-to-touch, hard-to-see abstrac-
tions powerfully criss-crossing our concrete quotidian lives is key.”24 As
Theo passes through the gates to the Bexhill Refugee Camp, a palimpsest
of historical referents appears, as the gates themselves look remarkably
like those outside of the Nazi concentration camps of World War II such
as Auschwitz and Dachau, but the sign above the gates reads not “Arbeit
Macht Frei” (Work shall set you free) but “Homeland Security.” In this very
detailed and carefully choreographed scene of entering the camp, Cuarón
hints at the extrapolative process that led him to this grim near future.
Nazi concentration camps and U.S.-backed detention centers haunt Bex-
hill’s architecture as historical antecedents, and through these visual cues,
Cuarón’s film glances at the apparition of state-sanctioned torture and or-
ganized ethnic persecution. As Theo, Kee, and Miriam (Kee’s doula) enter
the camp, the camera takes our gaze over the shoulders of the main charac-
ters to look with them out the bus window to witness hooded, handcuffed
prisoners kneeling in a line and dogs incited to terrorize and attack them.
Cuarón’s audience has seen similar images before, specifically in April
and May of 2004, when the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq came to public attention both online and through major media out-
lets such as cbs’s 60 Minutes II, the New Yorker, abc’s Nightly News, and the
Washington Post. One particularly chilling specter of the torture acts at Abu
Ghraib lingers for an extra moment on screen in Children of Men as the bus
pauses in front of a hooded detainee, standing on a box behind bars, arms
extended to each side of his body, and rendered immobile because, as the
audience already knows, he has been told that if he falls off the box, he will
trigger the wires connected to him and be electrocuted. In this quick mo-
ment, the recent past and the near future collide, causing a rupture in the
cinematic temporality of Theo’s narrative—effectively causing the present
to waver.25 In this way, Cuarón makes critical use of the speculative fiction
genre by imagining a future that nevertheless remains haunted by the past.
By bringing the specter of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo home to
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Bexhill, England, the film relocates the prison camp and the military de-
tention center within domestic borders rather than allowing it to rest in
the offshore imaginary.
In her stunning essay “Where Is Guantánamo?” Amy Kaplan lays out
the stakes of such a move. She writes that “the legal space of Guantánamo
today has been shaped and remains haunted by its imperial history. This
complex history helps to explain how Guantánamo has become an ambigu-
ous space both inside and outside different legal systems. Guantánamo’s
geographic and historical location provides the legal and political ground-
work for the current violent penal regime.”26 In Children of Men, Cuarón
effectively summons the specter of state-sponsored systems of disappear-
ance by reproducing in Bexhill the chilling realities of offshore prison
camps and “black site” detention centers of the twenty-first century. This
cinematic technology may allow for a temporal haunting, but anamorpho-
sis nevertheless requires a central gaze, around which the parameters of
peripheral vision are delineated. The sidelong glance and the oblique look
do not necessarily challenge the dynamics of spectatorship. Viewers must
deal with the foreground even while the background compels our atten-
tion, and we remain primarily tethered to Theo’s point of view throughout
Cuarón’s film. We follow Theo’s footsteps and rarely come to inhabit Kee’s
perspective of being shuttled around by various groups who hope to capi-
talize on the significance of her pregnancy.
Furthermore, Theo can never fully disavow his privileged point of view.
Smuggled into Bexhill, he even tries to feign foreignness when a prison
guard threatens to compromise the secret of Kee’s condition. The scene
in which Theo attempts to speak in broken English to disguise his native
tongue is one of the most awkward and least believable moments in the
film. After all, Theo has access, through family connections, to the papers
required for more mobility across a heavily surveilled and policed state.
Before he meets Kee, he moves easily from one mode of transportation
to the next as he passes before cages of detained subjects. Even when he
is jumped and forcibly taken from the street—a gesture toward the ap-
parently commonplace disappearances of other citizens—the whole event
turns out to be somewhat of a charade, as his ex-wife Julian (Julianne
Moore) has orchestrated the “theatrics,” as she calls them, to arrange a
clandestine meeting with him. The tension anamorphosis creates between
center and periphery ultimately remains beholden to a framework that re-
produces an imperialist dichotomy between a metropole (ostensibly home
to order, modernity, and science) and a periphery (an imagined site of
chaos, primitiveness, and irrationality). Even the film’s setting moves from
the metropole (London) to the countryside (a barn) and eventually to the
shore (Bexhill), where those who have been deported from the metropole
must now fight to survive.
Race and the Visual Iconographies of Futurity

The lack of attention to Kee’s point of view becomes all the more troubling
when one considers what symbolic work her body performs in Cuarón’s
screenplay and cinematic orchestration. The scene in which Kee reveals
her pregnancy—to the camera, the audience, and Theo—demonstrates
the film’s conflicted politics of representing reproduction. Staged in a barn
on a dairy farm, the scene places Kee, Theo, and a herd of dairy cows amid
the mechanical apparatuses of industrialized milk extraction. Various tubes
and pumps fill the confined space, and as we enter the barn along with Theo,
Kee stands in a central pen surrounded by several calves. Surrounded, too,
by the signs of industrial technology, Kee comments on the surgical cruelty
these dairy cows undergo for the sake of the dairy industry: “You know
what they do to these cows? They cut off their tits. They do. [Imitating slic-
ing.] Gone. Bye. Only leave four. Four tits fits the machine. It’s wacko. Why
not make machines that suck eight titties?” On the one hand, Cuarón’s barn
scene connects the exploitation of black women’s bodies and the exploita-
tion of dairy cows, which live only twenty-three years, during which time
their sole functions are to become pregnant, produce a fat calf immediately
slated for the slaughterhouse, and produce milk. Kee’s commentary on the
violence committed against the dairy cows, whose udders are surgically re-
moved to fit industrial milking apparatuses, points to capitalism’s subjuga-
tion of reproductive bodies to profit-driven productivity. That Kee speaks
from within the pen among the calves signifies a critical connection to the
biopolitical mechanisms of excluding certain forms of life from the protec-
tions of modern liberal humanism, even as such exclusions participate in
the production of a seemingly universal liberal subject.27
One might also be reminded of another scene of black motherhood in
literary history. When in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe enters a barn to
take her baby’s life, it is to save it from the institution of slavery, a sys-
tem that relies on black women’s reproduction to perpetuate itself. In this
novel, readers enter the horrific barn scene through the perspective of the
96 - CHAPTER 3
third-person omniscient, and we understand Sethe’s drastic act as the end-
ing of a biological life whose political life the institution of slavery has al-
ready terminated. When Schoolteacher laments the loss of Sethe’s viability
as a slave, he explains to his son that “you just can’t mishandle creatures
and expect success.”28 Cuarón’s version of the barn scene differs from Mor-
rison’s narrative of a black fugitive woman desperate to spare her child
from a future intent on capitalizing on that child’s life by setting up the
black mother as an object to be gazed at rather than as the subject through
whom the audience experiences the scene. As Anthony Bogues notes, “We
have not spent much time thinking about this question of who and what is
a human being from the perspective of human beings who were considered
to be non-humans.”29 In Children of Men, Cuarón replaces the scene of hor-
ror in the barn with a scene of hope, set to the angelic sounds of revelation
orchestrated by John Tavener, the British composer known for combining
Christian themes with 1970s minimalism. The moment becomes sacral-
ized and transformed into a manger scene, alluding to miraculous birth.
Kee stands in three-quarter view, covering her breasts with one arm and
cupping her belly with the other, in a pose reminiscent of Sandro Botti-
celli’s Venus. By directing Kee to pose in this way, Cuarón draws her into a
visual lexicon of Renaissance art and a story about giving birth to an Age of
Reason. He also subjects Kee to what Haraway—in her analysis of Albrecht
Dürer’s 1538 engraving Draughtsman Drawing a Nude—calls the disciplin-
ing “screen-grid” of perspectival looking, or the “virtual speculum,” which
“attests to the power of the technology of perspective to discipline vision to
produce a new kind of knowledge of form.”30 Haraway’s virtual speculum
argument asks us to consider works like Dürer’s Draughtsman as narrativ-
izations of enlightenment and modernity that contribute to the production
of “historical configurations conventionally called the ‘Renaissance,’ or in
a later version of the birth of the modern, the ‘Scientific Revolution,’ or
today’s rendition called the ‘New World Order’ [. . .] as cradles of modern
humanity.” The visual technology itself, as speculum in Haraway’s descrip-
tion, facilitates the birth of modernity, and in the case of Cuarón’s Children
of Men, the visual speculum of cinematic mastery delivers a promise of
futurity, albeit a vexed one.
These overtures to both Christian iconography and Renaissance art,
though, supplant white iconic womanhood with Kee, whose status as a
refugee and fugitive in the narrative implicitly raises questions about the
limits of these humanistic iconographies. In these directorial choices, Cua-
rón may invoke a European Enlightenment tradition, but he does so while
pulling into the center of the frame the history of slavery and racial ex-
clusion that subtend the very notion of what Jamaican philosopher Sylvia
Wynter calls humanism under the Western order of Man.
But what exactly does Theo behold when he looks? What is the phe-
nomenological effect of what he sees? Theo initially misunderstands what
Kee’s disrobing signals. “What are you doing? Don’t do that,” he implores
as Kee begins to drop her shift off her shoulders. Momentarily misinter-
preting the unveiling of her pregnancy as a sexual invitation, Theo begins
to avert his eyes but is then, upon realizing that Kee is actually revealing
the Future of Man, is permitted to fall headlong into another kind of look-
ing. Panning slowly up from the calves in the pen to Kee’s naked, pregnant
torso, the camera invites viewers to inhabit a scopophilic spectator position
that fetishizes the black pregnant body, projecting onto Kee Hope in the
form of the Unborn Child.31
The barn scene in Children of Men serves primarily to signal the major
turning point for Theo, who sheds his reluctance to become a hero because
he finally realizes “what’s at stake,” as another character points out. But,
whose future is at stake in Children of Men exactly? Kee’s child will bear
the name Dylan, after Theo’s dead son, and the name of the boat that will
ostensibly deliver them to safety is The Tomorrow. The reproductive tech-
nology at work here takes the shape of a narrative arc that writes a man’s
hopes and visions for the future across the body of a woman of color.32 It is
a surrogation of Theo’s futurity and its investments are in the children of
Man, in Wynter’s sense of the word, of “our present ethnoclass (i.e., West-
ern bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself
as if it were the human itself.”33
The narrative remains guided by what Lee Edelman has called “repro-
ductive futurism,” a drive that in this case asks the black female body to
perform the labor of producing the figure of hope for Theo’s continuing
legacy. If Edelman objects to how the “universalized fantasy subtending the
image of the child coercively shapes the structures within which the ‘politi-
cal’ itself can be thought,”34 then the example of Children of Men presents us
with an intersectional version of that objection. The universalized fantasy
that structures “the political itself,” in the EuroAmerican Global North, at
least, must also be whiteness, and the virtual speculum must also be under-
stood as what Kobena Mercer identifies as a colonial fantasy of mastery
over the technology of looking.35
98 - CHAPTER 3
This narrative of white, reproductive futurity relies on a form of racial-
ized surrogation at a moment when reproductive technologies work to en-
sure the futures of wealthy, privileged subjects at the expense of the re-
productive labor of poor women around the world. Kee’s labor—aided not
only by Theo’s hands but also by the special effects that make the scene
cinematically possible—delivers a promise of hope, but for whom and ac-
cording to what terms?
Cuarón’s deployment of anamorphosis works as a visual technology to
signal a haunting, but this attempt to decenter the cinematic gaze is under-
mined by the narrative’s continual return to Theo’s point of view. The nar-
rative remains structured around a drive toward reproductive futurity that
restores white male heteropatriarchy by positioning Kee as a kind of sur-
rogate mother. These two arguments are ultimately intertwined. The privi-
leging of Theo’s perspective and the racialized reproductive imperative at
work in this film go hand in hand. Theo’s ultimate heroic sacrifice ensures
not only the survival of Kee and Dylan but also the reproduction of hetero-
patriarchal logic itself.
In the early to mid-1990s, feminist scholars of visual culture and sci-
ence studies began to turn much-needed critical attention to reproductive
discourses promoting ideologies around fetal personhood, a cultural con-
struction beholden to advances in reproductive technologies and macro-
and microphotography.36 These studies made their interventions during
the historical context of prolife campaigns that made use of fetal imaging,
the emergence of the sonogram as a visual technology of reproduction, and
critical attention to the work of biomedical photographer Lennart Nilsson.
Children of Men both instantiates and contemplates the relationship be-
tween reproductive technologies (in the Benjaminian sense) and the tech-
nologies of reproduction. In Cuarón’s film, digital billboards remind citi-
zens about state-mandated fertility tests and the criminalization of those
who refuse such medical surveillance. Meanwhile, the dvd’s extra features
proclaim the special effects “triumph” of simulating Kee’s birthing realisti-
cally on screen. Just as scientific technology such as electron micrographs
and fetal imaging can be used to create narratives about life, so Children
of Men capitalizes on cinematic special effects to orchestrate a science fic-
tion about futures dependent on the reproductive labor of women of the
Global South. Perhaps an inevitable irony of Cuarón’s narrative of restored
hope and rebirth is that the birth scene is computer-generated. The repro-
ductive technologies that deliver Kee’s baby as a cinematic event include
the replacing of Ashitey’s legs with prosthetic ones, the use of both an ani-
matronic baby and a computer-generated one, and a completely choreo-
graphed single-shot scene that lasts three and a half minutes.
My reading of Cuarón’s film is not a popular one. Naomi Klein and Žižek
team up on the dvd’s extra features to praise Children of Men for much of the
work it does. But to hold up the metaphorical infertility of the Global North
as embodied by Owen, Moore, and Caine and then hold up the possibility of
redemption and deliverance of that infertility through the figuration of the
Global South as mapped onto Ashitey’s body is to make black lives matter in
all the wrong ways, relegating Kee and her baby to the same kind of redemp-
tive onus of “saving” capitalism through racism. By drawing Children of Men
into conversation with the stories of Nadya Suleman and Alex Kuczynski,
I mean to call attention to the global, racialized capitalist system that sub-
tends the racialized reproductive futurity this chapter interrogates.37
The Racialization of Reproductive Futurity

In early 2015, I helped found the Ferguson Teaching Collective at Dart-
mouth College and launched a course called “10 Weeks, 10+ Professors:
#BlackLivesMatter.” Various news outlets picked up the story. In one out-
let, Fox News, the comments section yielded some predictably vitriolic
responses (see figure 3.1). The comments, posted by Internet trolls and
regurgitated from the various talking points of the Christian Right, fetish-
ize the life of the fetus to the neglect of sustaining black lives beyond in-
fancy. “If black lives really matter,” writes jdelagado, “they should be
stopping all the black baby abortions going on everyday.” And doc-
bugsy writes: “They can also teach about how over 13,000,000 black chil-
dren have been aborted since 1973.” The contradictory positions taken by
the digital peanut gallery in relation to birth control and abortion rights
are bewildering. When krbutler1947 writes “tell’em to get a job and use
a con dom [sic],” Bamadog replies: “@krbutler1947 A what? They don’t
have those in the hood.” Bamadog’s response should not be mistaken for a
call for wider access to birth control in publicly defunded neighborhoods,
and krbutler1947’s remark stops just short of making a full-blown eugeni-
cist suggestion only to save the body for the purposes of work. The racist
project of reducing black life to the function of labor can be seen elsewhere
in contemporary circumstances, too. Consider the glaring discrepancy be-
tween the life expectancies of blacks and whites in the United States; the
10 0 - C H A P T E R 3
Figure 3.1. Comments section of Fox News’s report, “Dartmouth to Offer ‘Black Lives
Matter’ Classes,” February 4, 2015, accessed July 31, 2016, http://www.foxnews.com
/us/2015/02/04/dartmouth-to-offer-black-lives-matter-classes.html. The comments
section has since been taken down.
disproportionate number of people of color incarcerated in arguably the
most industrious prison system on the planet; the uneven distribution of
wealth, access to education, quality of health care, and so on—in short, the
built environment of segregation in the United States that facilitates the
foreshortening of black lives.
The double appearance of Margaret Sanger’s name is what caught my
attention in this slurry of racist commentary. How does Sanger—the pro-
moter of birth control and reproduction as instruments of social reform,
founder of Planned Parenthood, and author of works such as “The Eugenic
Value of Birth Control Propaganda” and The Pivot of Civilization—become a
metonym for abortion? U.S. feminists of color as well as women from the
Global South have regularly critiqued Euro-American-centric conversations
about reproductive rights that fail to consider the proto-eugenicist history
of birth control movements led by Sanger and primarily white women in
the early twentieth-century United States. In her 1982 essay “Racism, Birth
Control, and Reproductive Rights,” Angela Davis situates 1980s reproduc-
tive rights debates in a longer history, including nineteenth-century, largely
white women’s birth control movements, which were known to have advo-
cated the involuntary sterilization of portions of the population deemed
unfit to reproduce under the proto-eugenicist auspices of social reform. In
this move, Davis interjects an account of racialized biopolitics that under-
writes reproductive rights. By questioning for whom and in what way birth
control is liberatory, she calls into question the ostensible universalism of
“the human,” “rights,” and “life.” Sylvia Wynter’s work makes me think that
reproductive rights, as they are formed around notions of human rights and
Enlightenment constructions of “man” as the rights bearer, have already
been compromised by the abjection of the slave and the migrant worker
from the conditions of the human. Similarly, Dorothy Roberts suggests that
the “notion of reproductive liberty . . . is limited by the liberal ideals of indi-
vidual autonomy and freedom from government interference.”38 Roberts
narrates a long history of denying black women’s autonomy over reproduc-
tion, from the slave era through the sterilization of black women during
the 1920s and 1930s and to the 1980s, when the distribution of Norplant
in black communities and the cutting off of assistance to children born to
women on welfare worked in tandem to curtail black women’s birth rates.
Since the global proliferation of arts have dovetailed with speculative
oocyte and surrogacy markets, the racialized biopolitics of reproduction
have intensified at the ivf-imf complex.39 As Marie Jenkins Schwartz
10 2 - C H A P T E R 3
has demonstrated, the medicalization of slave reproduction in the ante-
bellum U.S. South instantiates an earlier moment of biomedical and capi-
talist alignment. Chattel slavery’s reliance on reproduction after the U.S.
stopped importing slaves in 1808 occasioned the enmeshment of physician
and plantation owner interests.40 Slavery in the U.S. antebellum South pro-
duces through racial difference a biopoliticized population that renders
slave women’s bodies available for often violent, unanaesthitized surgical
and medical experimentation. The surrogation of a labor force that facili-
tates U.S. plantation slavery provides an antecedent to the ongoing racial-
ization of biopolitical reproduction after the advent of assisted reproduc-
tive technologies.
Calling on evidence from his other work on how the medical institu-
tion works to instill public hygiene, centralize information, and normalize
knowledge, Michel Foucault identifies a shift in the eighteenth century
toward thinking about humans at the scale of the “population.”41 Though
Foucault delivered his now much-cited lectures on biopolitics at the Col-
lège de France in the 1970s, that work does not enter into translation and
wider U.S. scholarly discussions until the first decade of the twenty-first
century. In the study of asymmetrical distributions of life chances, par-
ticularly in the context of U.S. racial formation and reproduction, I want
to keep black feminist thought central. While the significant contributions
of Angela Davis and Toni Morrison to the conversation about how black
lives comes to matter have already been part of this chapter’s ruminations,
it’s worth noting that their writings from the 1980s emerge in conjunc-
ture with one another out of black, feminist, alternative intellectual space.
While Morrison was a trade-book editor at Random House in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, she worked with many black feminist authors, including
Angela Davis. Davis would later bring to light how the two had sometimes
commuted into Manhattan together.42 This carpool constitutes a space for
black feminist thought, wherein the story of Margaret Garner—the slave
woman who took her infant’s life to save it from enslavement—would
eventually form the basis of Morrison’s character Sethe in Beloved (1987)
as well as Davis’s pivotal 1982 essay on intersectional approaches to repro-
ductive justice. This seemingly ancillary anecdote illustrates how the pre-
histories of race and reproduction as they come up through black feminist
exchanges play an important role in understanding the connections be-
tween newer and older reproductive technologies. Seeing the continuities
across the biopolitical histories of slavery and the ongoing practices of dis-
possession of reproductive agency in speculative biomarkets help identify
the racialized systems of reproductive futurity. In the next section, I con-
sider Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, which speculates on a vexed uni-
verse through which different stories about black lives, technology, and
labor, navigate off-world fantasies of freedom and liberation.
Midnight Robber’s Diasporic Constellations

Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby
we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and
invent the future.
—bell hooks , Black Looks
Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to
mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in oppressive Western
cultures. . . . This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex
codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition.
—H E N RY L O U I S G AT E S, J R. , The Signifying Monkey
There is no solid ground beneath us; we shift constantly to stay in one place.
—N A L O H O P K I N S O N , “Speaking in Tongues”
In his article “Black to the Future,” Mark Dery raises the question: “Why
do so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close
encounters with the Other—the stranger in a strange land—would seem
uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists?”43 Dery’s
article appears in a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Dis-
course of Cyberculture,” published in 1993. Since then, this question has
been revisited in various forms by a number of scholars, including Samuel
Delany, Anna Everett, Walter Mosley, Alondra Nelson, Gregory Rutledge,
Greg Tate, and Sheree Thomas.44 Over the past decade or so, some academic
journals—ranging from Extrapolation, which focuses on science fiction
studies, to Callaloo, which emphasizes scholarly work on African diasporic
studies—have dedicated more attention to black science fiction writers,
especially Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany. One of these articles—Kalí
Tal’s “‘That Just Kills Me’: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction,” in a special
issue of Social Text titled “Afrofuturism”—begins with an anecdote about
the author’s 1977 experience in a science fiction writing course in Holly-
wood, during which she was asked to write a story about “why black people
don’t write science fiction.”45 Tal suggests that the instructor (and, by ex-
tension, Mark Dery) “asked the wrong question.” Collectively, the essays in
10 4 - C H A P T E R 3
the Afrofuturism issue of Social Text suggest that black people have been
excluded from technocultural discourse, despite always having had a re-
lationship to and participating in technocultural production.
In several interviews, Hopkinson, whose novel Midnight Robber is the
focus of this section, deplores the inadequacies of terms such as “science
fiction,” “fantasy,” “horror,” and “magical realism.” She defines her work as
speculative fiction, or “spec-fic,” a genre that achieves the following: “We
imagine what we want from the world; then we try to find a way to make
it happen. Escapism can be the first step to creating a new reality, whether
it’s a personal change in one’s existence or a larger change in the world. For
me, spec-fic is a contemporary literature that is performing that act of the
imagination . . . as fiction that starts from the principle of making the impos-
sible possible.”46 For her, speculative fiction potentially performs the work
of social change rather than just generating “adventure stories for white
boys with high tech toys.”47 In doing so, it intervenes in the common mis-
interpretation of the genre as being “primarily by and about white men.”48
Hopkinson’s imaginings of the possibilities of collaboration take as their
historical premise the intertwined labor histories of African and Asian mi-
grations to the Americas. In what follows, I focus on Midnight Robber as
one example of how extrapolative fiction can interrogate systems of labor,
kinship structures, and power by shifting assumptions about modernity
and technology. As in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, space and time travel in
Midnight Robber, which unfolds across multiple dimensions and worlds,
allows for encounters with various historical traces and trajectories. Each
time-space in Hopkinson’s tale of the Midnight Robber Tan-Tan gives rise
to another iteration of persistent labor abuses. What is more, Midnight Rob-
ber is also a prison narrative. The colony-planet Toussaint sends its carceral
population to the prison-planet New Half-Way Tree—an exilic journey to
another dimension in which prisoners must relearn how to rely on their
own physical work, because New Half-Way Tree functions entirely with-
out the help of artificial intelligence (ai). Space, it seems, is not the final
frontier; Hopkinson’s characters pass through dimensional veils to New
Half-Way Tree, a trip suggestive of the multidimensional reverberations
of slavery and incarceration that defy the progress narrative’s tendency to
imagine racial discrimination as something that lives only in the past.
Born in Jamaica and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Hopkinson sup-
plants Western myths of techno-origins with techno-networks that arise
from overlapping diasporas and the intimacies among Chinese, Indo-, and
Afro-Caribbean migrations. In her imagined future, moments of crisis do
not occasion a reversion to the nuclear, heteronormative family but rather
yield collaborative communities of multiply displaced peoples who form
coalitions across various formations of families that include gender-queer
models of intimacy. One of my interests in Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber lies
in how this work of speculative fiction thereby queers notions of futurity.
Hopkinson’s formulation of futurity, however, not only looks forward but
also thinks through alternative histories of technoscience. This doubly va-
lenced view of the future emerges through a postcolonial critique of West-
ern constructions of modernity. In these ways, Midnight Robber reminds us
that storytelling itself, in its various forms of written and oral traditions, is
a powerful technology capable of manipulating memories, charting mul-
tiple trajectories, and shifting the parameters of how we conceive of past,
present, and future. I therefore examine how she understands the science
fiction genre as a mode of writing that could stand to learn much from
practices of storytelling beyond the Western canon.
Though both canonical science and science fiction proclaim their de-
scent from Western origins, Midnight Robber imagines what kind of future
would ensue from technocultural origin myths and rhetoric that emerge
out of diasporic African roots.49 For example, Hopkinson draws a parallel
between the Middle Passage of African slaves to the New World and the
arrival of Caribbean space colonists to Toussaint, a planet populated with
people of mixed race who have banded together to escape Earth’s longstand-
ing patterns of exploitative labor practices. The novel both commences and
concludes in Jonkanoo season, “when all of Toussaint would celebrate the
landing of the Marryshow Corporation nation ships that had brought their
ancestors to this planet two centuries before” (18).50 Indeed, Hopkinson
organizes the entire narrative around celebrations of diasporic movement.
The original settlers of Toussaint arrived in rocket ships rather than tall
ships, but the parallel between this fantastic voyage and the Middle Pas-
sage is reinforced by Ben, who has given the protagonist, Tan-Tan, a carni-
val hat in the shape of a ship. Ben says: “Long time, that hat would be make
in the shape of a sea ship, not a rocket ship, and them black people inside
woulda been lying packup head to toe in they own shit, with chains round
them ankles. Let the child remember how black people make this crossing
as free people this time” (21).
Ben draws an explicit connection between this future interplanetary
journey and the transatlantic slave route, and Tan-Tan’s Jonkanoo ship-hat
10 6 - C H A P T E R 3
also refers to other mass movements of diasporic communities. With the
name “Black Star Line II” etched into its side, Tan-Tan’s rocket ship alludes
to Marcus Garvey’s original Black Star Line, intended to facilitate a large-
scale back-to-Africa movement in the 1920s. But more than supplanting
one set of origin myths for another, Hopkinson suggests the ways diasporic
movement itself functioned as Caribbean technoculture.
In this future world, spaceships recall an African diasporic past rather
than Western classical legacies. In an interview with Dianne Glave,
Hopkinson makes this argument very explicitly: “The current metaphors
for technology and social behaviors and systems are largely from Greco-
Roman mythology. We call our spaceships Apollo and our complexes Oedi-
pus. We talk about cyberspace. So I wondered what metaphors we (Carib-
bean people) would create for technologies that we had made, how we
would think about those technologies.”51 In this quotation, Hopkinson asks
us to think critically about the names and metaphors people use to de-
scribe technology. She insightfully asserts that narratives about technology
affect how we categorize “technology” and may even limit the process of
conceiving of other kinds of technologies altogether. Naming spaceships
after Greco-Roman mythology—or, for that matter, naming an early Space
Shuttle orbiter prototype after the famous science fiction starship Enter-
prise—suggests a Western origin myth for technology that eclipses other
points of technological origins and adaptations. Hopkinson adopts Carib-
bean myths as the creative basis for the names of and the logics behind
the various technological innovations in Midnight Robber to alter common
perceptions of what technology is, where it came from, and therefore who
has a claim to it.
The image of the ship is equally central to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlan-
tic.52 Gilroy emphasizes black transnational networks of social activism and
cross-pollinating cultural production. Like Hopkinson, he establishes the
Middle Passage as a sort of origin myth for future transoceanic crossings
by the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Marcus Garvey.
Through this same image of the ship, Hopkinson puts together these
notions of diaspora and network to generate an alternative narrative about
technology’s relationship to projects of racial formation. The imaginative
premise of Midnight Robber shifts the origins of a technofuture world from
Greco-Roman, European Enlightenment roots to African routes—from an
imperialist epistemology of amassed knowledge to a different model of in-
formation dispersal and circuitry. In her formulation of artificially intelli-
gent eshus, tonal-based code resembling Caribbean patois, and nanomite-
seeded Nation Worlds linked together by a digital network called Granny
Nanny, Hopkinson speculates on an alternative genealogy of technology.
Her imagination of an alternative genealogy from which a richly described
world of technologies emerges is successful beyond just the superficial
level of providing new names for existing technology. Conceived from an
Afro-Caribbean trickster tradition, Toussaint’s system of eshus and Anansi
webs does not understand truth to be self-evident, universal, or beyond
question. Rather, these artificially intelligent beings learn to tell partial
truths and to manipulate historical narratives according to their audiences.
This is how one character’s wife is able to have an affair in her home with-
out her husband finding out from the house eshu and how Tan-Tan’s robot
nurse is able to keep up with her insatiable appetite for alternative histo-
ries. In these ways, Hopkinson shows how intertwined cultural myths and
technological innovations can be.
In Midnight Robber, technoscience does not take the form of Big Brother
but of “Granny Nanny,” whose name has three apparent sources: Granny
Nanny of the Maroons, a legendary hero of Jamaica who led and organized
the Maroons and other black dissidents against the British during the 1720s
and 1730s; the nanotechnology that facilitates the human-machine inter-
face on Toussaint, “the Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface” (10, empha-
sis mine); and Anansi, the trickster figure who takes the shape of a spider.
“Granny Nansi’s Web” reconfigures what we might think of as the World
Wide Web, or the Internet, but the paradigm has shifted dramatically.
Rather than emerging from William Gibson’s conceptualization of “cyber-
space” or from Bill Gates’s corporate empire, this net earns its name from a
web, or network, or even archipelago of cultural exchange throughout the
African diaspora.
Though the cyberspace we know is based on a binary language, Granny
Nanny’s code is “tonal instead of text-based” (51). Navigating the web in
Toussaint probably requires more familiarity with an oral tradition than
with a written one. Indeed, “nannycode” or “nannysong” sounds most like
the “warbling patwa” (221) of the douen women, whose nearly incompre-
hensible speech-song is so difficult to set down in type that Hopkinson
captures it by using bold print, asterisks, and a different font from the rest
of the text. She has already theorized her own use of creolized languages,
but it is interesting to consider how the paradigm shift she discusses in
her interview with Glave works to alter the etymological roots that shape
10 8 - C H A P T E R 3
our discourse and understanding of technoculture. By disassociating tech-
nology from its Greek and Latin roots, Midnight Robber aims at making
the sf genre available to non-European writers whose cultural inheri-
tance might include Yoruban mythology, Chinese folklore, or South Asian
legends. The language that best expresses technoculture for Hopkinson is
a kind of Caribbean patois, emblematic of the kind of “fusion of the genres”
that she is after.53
At the end of the novel, Tan-Tan steps into the role of Robber Queen,
the notorious trickster figure of the novel’s title. The Midnight Robber at
carnival time pretends to capture fellow revelers to terrify them with gory
stories about death and destruction and to elicit coins from the audience in
exchange for sparing their lives. Abducted into slavery, taken to a strange
land filled with strange people, and forced to thieve in order to survive, the
Midnight Robber works well as an sf hero or heroine who must earn his or
her keep by being an excellent wordsmith.
The novel’s opening poem, “Stolen Song,” by David Findlay, celebrates
signification practices and trickster finesse in its repetition of the line “I
stole the torturer’s tongue!” Creolization and signification serve as survival
techniques in Midnight Robber. What Hopkinson refers to as the “word sci-
ence” of the Robber Queen or Tan-Tan is what ultimately saves our heroine
when she vanquishes Janisette in a verbal duel at the end of the novel (320).
Dressed in full Robber costume, Tan-Tan “spat at Janisette—‘no mercy!’—
the traditional final phrase of the calypsonian who’d won the battle of wits
and words. Tan-Tan gasped, put a hand up to her magical mouth” (326).
Tan-Tan herself is a black sf writer. From an early age, she crafts “tales to
pass the time” by extrapolating from bits of history available to her on the
web: “So the minder would access the Nanny history from the web and
try to adapt it to Tan-Tan’s notions of how the story went” (17). Tan-Tan’s
ability to adapt historical narratives and create speculative fiction out of
those variations points to the way in which Hopkinson uses historical re-
visions of technocultural origin myths to carve out a space for more alter-
native sf writers. “I’m fascinated with the notion of breaking an imposed
language apart and remixing it,” she writes. “To speak in the hacked lan-
guage is not just to speak in an accent or a creole; to say the words aloud
is an act of referencing history and claiming space.”54 This quotation most
cogently reveals the way in which Hopkinson sees the creolization of lan-
guage as a form of technology that can be “remixed” and “hacked” to claim
space within an overly narrow definition of sf as a literary tradition. Be-
cause Tan-Tan’s trickster speech saves her life, weaving fabulist tales (and
writing speculative fiction) represents an integral survival technique, as
Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues about “mastering the figurative” as an essen-
tial means of “black survival in oppressive Western cultures.” Figuring Tan-
Tan’s linguistic prowess around the popular carnival character of the Mid-
night Robber, Hopkinson refers to the character’s use of “Robber Talk,”
derived from the African griot tradition of storytelling. However, as the
female protagonist who vanquishes her enemies with a performance of
Robber Talk, Tan-Tan’s Robber Queen also enacts a feminist appropriation
of the male-dominated griot tradition—an intervention Hopkinson herself
makes to the genre of science fiction.
Though many of the more overt signs of a diasporic literary inheritance
are specifically African in origin, Hopkinson emphatically asserts the cross-
ethnic circulation at work in the Caribbean. Midnight Robber’s heroes are
figures of hybridity, heterogeneous bloodlines, and nomadic exile. Tous-
saint is already a planet of exiles, and it has established another dimen-
sion of exiles on the prison colony, worlds up the halfway tree. Going up
this tree involves travel across several “dimensional veils” (74–75). Several
scholars, including Hopkinson herself, have already made the connection
between this phrase and Du Bois’s use of the “veil” concept in his articula-
tion of double consciousness in Souls of Black Folk.55 Hopkinson also makes
the connection to veils in an Indian experience of double consciousness
in her online essay “Dark Ink,” in which she cites Uppinder Mehan’s essay
“The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Stories.”56
Tan-Tan suffers a sort of double exile over the course of the novel. She
first becomes uprooted from her home on Toussaint when she follows her
father, Antonio, into exile on New Half-Way Tree after he commits a mur-
der. Then when Tan-Tan herself turns the knife on her father-turned-rapist,
she must flee into the wilderness to live with the douen people: “She had
had home torn from her again” (193). Tan-Tan’s story of double exile, forced
migration, and dislocation from home resonates with Caribbean history
not only because of the halfway tree parallel to the forced migrations along
the transatlantic slave route, but also because of its surprising connection
to the Indian epic the Ramayana. Tracing the routes of this Indian cultural
artifact, one notices how the Caribbean becomes one site where African
and South Asian cultural routes intersect. Hopkinson’s construction of this
future world of exilic Caribbean peoples includes a reminder that a history
of the Caribbean includes not only the African slave trade but also the mi-
11 0 - C H A P T E R 3
gration of East Indian laborers to Trinidad and Tobago as well as Jamaica,
following the abolition of slavery. Hopkinson is completely mindful of this
convergence of two powerful oral traditions. For example, when Granny
Nanny tells stories about Tan-Tan to several children, Hopkinson is care-
ful to include one audience member named Sita, whose namesake in the
Ramayana also suffers a double exile (78).57 Some settlers of Toussaint, we
learn, made their intergalactic voyage on a vessel named “Shipmate Shiva,”
which carried “longtime ago East Indians, the ones who crossed the Kal-
pani, the Black Water on Earth to go and work their fingers to the bone
as indentured labour in the Caribbean” (49). Jonkanoo week, a celebra-
tion around Christmas time in the Caribbean, is another sign of Toussaint’s
heterogeneous ancestry. It is a “time to remember the way their forefathers
had toiled and sweated together: Taino Carib and Arawak; African; Asian;
Indian; even the Euro, though some wasn’t too happy to acknowledge that-
there bloodline. All the bloods flowing into one river, making a new home
on a new planet” (18). In this passage, Hopkinson points to the enmeshed
bloodlines that constitute the population of Toussaint. It is a world in
which hybridity and créolité are celebrated, overturning colonialist privi-
leging of European bloodlines.
Midnight Robber not only names an Afro-Caribbean legacy to these space
colonists but also recognizes the ways in which the African slave trade and
the Asian coolie trade to the Caribbean remain linked and shared labor his-
tories. In her depictions of Toussaint and New Half-Way Tree, Hopkinson
renders the Caribbean archipelago a speculative space, in which diasporic
movement works as a technology that travels covalently with other intensi-
fied global flows, including the conjuncture of African slave labor and Asian
migrant labor to the Caribbean.
Though brought together by the common blood, sweat, and tears shed
over the backbreaking work shared by all these racialized bodies, the multi-
ethnic community of Toussaint enjoys a rather idyllic respite. No human
bodies labor on Toussaint because various machines, ai, and “Granny
Nanny” take care of most day-to-day conveniences. A robotic wetnurse
provides Tan-Tan with milk from the moment she is born, and later a “min-
der” functions as Tan-Tan’s primary caretaker, playmate, babysitter, and
gentle disciplinarian: “[Tan-Tan] liked leaning against the minder’s yielding
chicle, humming along with the nursery rhymes it would sing to her. She
had nearly outgrown the minder now, yes, but it did its level best to keep up
with her” (17). The most visible acts of robot labor on Toussaint are forms
of reproductive labor—precisely the kind of work that Caribbean migrant
women perform in the Global North.
On the planet Toussaint, descendants of a slave exodus from Earth create
an artificially intelligent class of servants who perform all acts of manual
and domestic labor, from nursing human infants to running (or pulling)
pedicabs and cleaning houses. As one character puts it, “backbreak ain’t
for people” (8). There is even a labor tax on humans who elect to perform
manual labor. Mayor Antonio explains to a pedicab runner: “Is a labour
tax. For the way allyou insist on using people when a a.i. could run a cab
like this. You know how it does bother citizens to see allyou doing manual
labor so” (8). Only one subset of human society on Toussaint refuses this
dependence on ai, and Hopkinson uses this group to think through the re-
lationship between technology and labor.
The pedicab runners of Toussaint are descendants of hackers who use
their techno-savvy to maintain privacy, Toussaint’s “most precious com-
modity” (10). Because Toussaint’s buildings, tools, and “even the Earth
itself” have been “seeded with nanomites,” the “Nation Worlds were one
enormous data-gathering system” monitored, regulated, and disseminated
through one network (10). In such a data-fueled world, questions about
labor arise alongside questions about information, history, and narrative.
The pedicab runners “lived in group households and claimed that it was
their religious right to use only headblind tools” (10). Organizing off the
grid, these communities also form social networks that depart from nor-
mative familial structures. The pedicab runner Beata, whom Antonio en-
counters at the beginning of the novel, is a woman who lives with three
wives and the father of her children in one home. As a pedicab runner,
Beata creates her own routes that serve as ways to circulate information
clandestinely, in a fashion similar to the strategy used by Toussaint’s name-
sake Toussaint L’Ouverture, who, as a free black coachman, could dissemi-
nate information and organize the Haitian Revolution, the first success-
ful slave revolt in the New World. Hopkinson’s depiction of these queer
pedicab communities models in speculative fiction the kinds of queer kin-
ship formations elucidated in Martin Manalansan’s work on “queer love.”58
Researching queer of color, makeshift communities in Jackson Heights,
Queens, Manalansan focuses on how migrant, undocumented workers re-
spond to the precarious conditions of their labor by altering notions of
“family.”59 Hopkinson rewrites the developmental progress narrative as it
pertains to not only technofutures but also to sexuality and thus empha-
11 2 - C H A P T E R 3
sizes the importance of thinking through notions of futurity as inextricably
linked to formulations of sexuality. In her incisive study of the policing of
sexuality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas, M. Jacqui Alexander ar-
gues that in the postcolonial context, when the “nation” and its ideologies
are in tumult, the criminalization of queer sex “functions as a technology of
control, and much like other technologies of control becomes an important
site for the production and reproduction of state power.”60
The machine-human relationship on Toussaint purports to be nonabu-
sive and benevolent, at first. The ai workers do not complain or revolt;
they are eternally docile, subservient, and helpful. Nevertheless, Hopkin-
son undermines potential techno-utopian readings in at least two ways.
First, the original denizens of Toussaint are comprised of refugees from
Earth’s Caribbean islands, where a history of slavery and hard, unpaid labor
is actively remembered during every Jonkanoo season on Toussaint. De-
spite this history, people on Toussaint fail to think self-critically about this
new generation of laboring, albeit mechanical, bodies. Hopkinson’s inven-
tion of a multiethnic, diasporic community calls attention to the politics of
nonhuman, so-called free labor.
Hopkinson’s focus on Toussaint’s overdependence on a subjugated labor
force becomes readily apparent in the second half of the novel when she
introduces readers to the prison-colony-world of New Half-Way Tree. This
new world remains strangely familiar as we discover it is only Toussaint
again in a parallel universe. In this alternate dimension, though, Toussaint/
New Half-Way Tree is technologically impoverished; there are no “docile
machines” to perform manual labor. The primary burden of work on New
Half-Way Tree has been displaced onto the shoulders of the indigenous
creatures of the planet. These forest dwellers are threatened by the im-
pending onslaught of industrialization in the human sectors of the planet.
Some are craftsmen, some work as gardeners, and some trade goods with
the human colonists as merchants. The actual details of the labor they per-
form, though, remain rather vague, as Hopkinson’s descriptions focus more
on the power dynamics apparent in everyday encounters between groups.
By juxtaposing New Half-Way Tree and Toussaint as employing different
systems of labor, Hopkinson implicitly asks (in a similar vein as other sf
stories such as Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders” and Sergio Arau and Ya-
reli Arizmendi’s 2004 film, A Day without a Mexican) what would happen to
a place like Toussaint if all the workers suddenly disappeared. Hopkinson
uses these parallel dimensions to posit alternative but repetitive systems of
oppression. Even when sovereignty is no longer an issue—when slaves and
prisoners escape across space and time—exploitative and violent social re-
lations continue when masculinist paradigms remain in place.
On New Half-Way Tree, Tan-Tan discovers a preindustrial society in
which everyone (human and nonhuman) must perform hard labor.61 It is
here that Hopkinson introduces readers to the douens, who are reptilian
and birdlike creatures serving but living separately from humans. Though
exiles themselves, the humans have become the colonizers of a new world.
The human settlers find themselves in need of help from but threatened
by the indigenous creature-peoples already there. Hopkinson’s critique is
of how quickly and readily a marginalized people will figure out a way to
exploit another group once they themselves have access to power. Hopkin-
son’s description of the everyday interactions between the humans and the
douen recalls scenes from African American literature, including conjure
tales and slave narratives by Charles Chesnutt and Frederick Douglass that
emphasize linguistic adeptness bolstered by a trickster tradition. Infan-
tilized within a paternalistic system of coerced subservience, the douens
share somewhat in what is often considered to be an African American
experience. Humans address Chichibud, Tan-Tan’s first douen friend, as
“boy,” and Tan-Tan observes how men “spoke to Chichibud the way adults
spoke to her” (120). Hopkinson casts Chichibud, in turn, as the consum-
mate trickster figure whose witticisms delight Tan-Tan as an avid student of
the double-voiced black vernacular he deploys. When a human challenges
his laughter by asking, “You have something to say?” Chichibud replies,
“No, Boss. Is tall-people business, oui?” (123). Though Tan-Tan arrives on
New Half-Way Tree by hacking codes and manipulating time and space,
she learns from Chichibud how to deploy such code sliding in everyday
cultural practices of storytelling and dialogue. When Chichibud addresses
the village men as “Master,” Tan-Tan expresses her dismay and confusion:
“Master? Only machines were supposed to give anybody rank like that. . . .
Tan-Tan scolded, ‘He not your boss, Chichibud.’ . . . Shipmates all have the
same status. Nobody higher than a next somebody. You must call he ‘Com-
pere,’ she explained to the douen” (121).
According to the new human settlers of New Half-Way Tree, the douens,
who practice “obeah magic,” are “superstitious” (121) and “simple” (139).
The douens reject industrialization and insist on working only with wood
and natural materials; they “did everything with their hands and never
thought to advance themselves any further” (139). In this way, Hopkin-
11 4 - C H A P T E R 3
son levies a critique against the faulty correspondence between techno-
logical advancement and matter-of-course superiority that colonizers have
deployed in their attempts to rationalize and justify their subjugation of
indigenous peoples. The douens excel in handicrafts—carpentry, weaving,
and the crafting of oral narratives. Here Hopkinson’s postcolonial critique
signals a challenge to the less troubled, more romantic picture of tech-
nology represented earlier in the novel on Toussaint.
Hopkinson cultivates an association between the function of the douen
on New Half-Way Tree and the status of the ai in Toussaint in order to
establish continuity across time and space—to emphasize the historical
and ongoing politics of labor. Despite inhabiting different space-times, the
douen and the ai both constitute laboring classes. On the one hand, tech-
nology has been a tool of colonization, oppression, and exploitation. On the
other hand, one could claim (as Gates, Everett, and Gilroy do) that alterna-
tive technologies have always been necessary, integral, and useful tools for
survival among those who are not readily granted access to dominant tech-
nologies. The inhabitants of New Half-Way Tree eventually erect iron forg-
eries that start to generate cars and weapons, which become the means of
persecuting Tan-Tan and driving out the douens from their tree homes. The
douens, sensing impending doom, do their best to learn the techniques of
ironwork despite the villagers’ profound efforts to keep the skills a secret,
private trade. Chichibud explains: “If douens don’t learn tallpeople tricks,
oonuh will use them ’pon we” (230). This logic returns us to Gates’s and
Hopkinson’s urgent advocacy of producing alternative technologies when
it comes to language. These technolingual strategies of coding and signify-
ing are particularly germane to the world of speculative fiction, and in this
way, speculative fiction itself works as a form of trickster technology that
takes the generic tools of science fiction and makes them available to com-
munities whose members have previously been excluded from the genre.
In her revision of technocultural origin myths and her imagination of
a technology emerging from a multiethnic Caribbean diasporic context,
Hopkinson looks beyond Eurocentric technocultural discourse for alter-
native genealogies and more expansive understandings of technology.
Furthermore, she not only extrapolates from this alternative genealogy a
futuristic world of embedded ai and networked societies, but she also sug-
gests that these technologies preexist in the forms of oral traditions and
diasporic communications in their conceptual emergence. Midnight Rob-
ber thereby provides a countermemory of technology in ways that resonate
with Gilroy’s articulation of a “counterculture of modernity” in his formu-
lation of the Black Atlantic.62
Drawing from a vast reservoir of Caribbean culture and history, Hopkin-
son conjures up a speculative reality, and her explicit desire to imagine a
techno-mythology specific to Caribbean communities attests to her nar-
ration of a technoculture that radically departs from Western Enlighten-
ment traditions. Her visual representation of the warbling patwa of the
douen women even constitutes an emergent form of language. Likewise,
Tan-Tan’s recognition of a similarity in these speech patterns to the nanny-
song she learned as a child on Toussaint from communicating with ai sug-
gests that hacking linguistic codes facilitates cross-cultural understanding.
Once Tan-Tan cracks the code, she realizes that her adoptive douen mother
Benta is not just chirping nonsense but in fact trying to communicate im-
portant messages to her.
Queer Families in Midnight Robber

In Midnight Robber, Tan-Tan forms an intimate relationship with Abitefa,
a nongender-specific member of the indigenous species of the planet. It is
a human/nonhuman intimacy that Hopkinson uses to explore alternative,
queer formations of families and futurities that interrogate the reproduc-
tive futurity associated with strictly human, heteronormative families. The
plot does not resolve with Tan-Tan finding solace in the invitation back into
human and heteronormative society by marrying Melonhead. Rather, that
childhood romance has been altered when they meet again, after Tan-Tan
has come to understand the queerer kinship formations of the douen. On
the brink of delivering her baby, Tan-Tan decides that she must leave the
human settlement to give birth: “‘Melonhead, I have to go home.’ ‘What
home? Where?’ ‘I have to go back in the bush to Abitefa.’ ‘You mad or what?
You turn bassourdie? You need to lie down and rest.’ ‘I will lie down when
I reach back in the bush. I have to go right now.’ Holding her belly protec-
tively, she turned on her heel and started walking, with or without him”
(327). Locating “home” for this doubly exiled woman, who has shifted across
both time and space, means “shifting constantly to stay in one place,” to put
it in Hopkinson’s words.63 Tan-Tan’s refusal to join normative society in the
form of either the human settlement or a heteronormative wedding indi-
cates Hopkinson’s search for an alternative to a reproductive futurism that
sustains heteropatriarchy. These queerings extend to narrative form, too.
11 6 - C H A P T E R 3
Midnight Robber is a speculative fiction that considers language and nar-
rative as technologies. It shifts across narrative points of view as frequently
as it plays with shifts across time and space. Hopkinson begins, ends, and
interrupts her narrative with short tales of Tan-Tan the Robber Queen, a
mythic set of tales narrated by the ai nano-eshu who has found its way
through Tan-Tan’s bloodstream to communicate with her developing fetus.
At other times, Hopkinson writes in the third person, with Tan-Tan as the
focal character. Moving back and forth between these two narrative modes,
one of them privileging a nonhuman point of view, Hopkinson emphasizes
multiple perspectives.
Written as a narrative about labor in a structural form that emphasizes
the labor of narrative production, Midnight Robber culminates and ends
with the birth of Tubman, Tan-Tan’s baby—whose name refers to Harriet
Tubman, who helped many slaves escape their bonds in the U.S. South and
find safe passage to the North, often going to Canada. The Underground
Railroad, with which the name Tubman is closely associated, functioned
as a network of secret routes and safe houses coordinated through a sys-
tem of code words borrowed from the railroad terminology. By giving Tan-
Tan’s child the name Tubman, Hopkinson again alludes to another system
of networks and linguistic codes used as tactical resistance to slavery. In
this way, Hopkinson encodes her own text with multiple kinds of deliver-
ies—the delivery of a child into the world, the delivery of slaves to freedom,
and the delivery of a speech act that wins Tan-Tan the verbal battle against
Janisette. Because Tan-Tan goes into labor precisely at the moment that she
pronounces the winning words of the competition, and given the fact that
part of Midnight Robber consists of an ai passing the stories of the mother
on to her fetus, Tan-Tan’s pregnancy also bears significance as a process of
bringing stories into being.
The story of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad is also a nar-
rative that retells the origin story of network societies. The name Tubman
invokes a network and perhaps specifically a fugitive framework that ex-
ceeds the borders of the United States, as do Hopkinson’s own affiliations
with Canada and the Caribbean. The Underground Railroad, which was
comprised of not only free slaves but also white abolitionists and Native
American activists, delivered runaway slaves to Canada and Mexico and
thus connected the Americas in a hemispheric relation.
Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, like Cuarón’s Children of Men, culminates
in the birth of a child. Kee’s baby girl, Dylan, will not only serve as a sur-
rogation of patrilineal futurity but will also shoulder the responsibility of
curing the world’s infertility. She and her mother will immediately become
subjects of medical experiments on board The Tomorrow, a vessel that might
symbolize a future for mankind but that will, in practice, sustain a long
history of subjecting black women to experiments in reproductive science.
Meanwhile, Tan-Tan’s delivery of Tubman not only refers us to a revolu-
tionary activist but also occurs simultaneously with Tan-Tan’s coming into
her own voice: “Tan-Tan knew her body to be hers again, felt her mouth
stretching, stretching open in amazement at the words that had come out
of it” (325–26). Describing not Tubman’s birth but the miraculous coming
into being of Tan-Tan’s story, Hopkinson shifts the site of accomplishment
and hope to rest not solely on the shoulders of the child but also on the
mother’s victorious monologue. Hope for the future in Midnight Robber
may ultimately reside in a birth, but Hopkinson’s emphasis on the legacies
and stories that get passed on to inform that future constitutes a feminist
and queer account of reproductive futurism.
The history surrounding women of color and reproduction in the United
States runs the gamut of some of the most egregious abuses of scientific
power in the histories of science, including sterilization campaigns and
medical experimentation on coerced subjects, not to mention the effects
of slavery on the reproductive health and futures of black women. By ana-
lyzing Children of Men and Midnight Robber, I offer two contemporary sci-
ence fictions that begin to interrogate a vexed history and politics of repro-
duction. In my consideration of the cinematography at work in Cuarón’s
film and the linguistic hacking prevalent in Hopkinson’s writing, I also sug-
gest the imbrications of science fictions of reproduction and reproductive
technologies in formulations of futurity and argue that speculative fiction
can unmoor futurity from the reproductive labor that is often exacted on
women of color. Against the backdrop of tenacious moves to relegate black
life to nonbeing, Hopkinson’s speculative revisions of race and reproduc-
tive possibility offer an important alternative to the racialized surrogations
of reproductive futurity.
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4
THE CRUEL OPTIMISM OF

T H E A S I A N C E N T U RY
The really good news is that few Asians have lost their optimism about the
future. They have no illusions about the crisis but are confident that they remain
on the right trajectory to deliver the Asian century.
—K I S H O R E M A H B U B A N I , “Why Asia Stays Calm in the Storm”
The latest real estate and military developments in the Pacific Ocean fea-
ture brazen feats of building on sand. After thirty years of land reclama-
tion efforts, Singapore’s construction of the Marina Bay Sands casino and
resort functions as the centerpiece to the city-state’s reinvention. China’s
creation of new islands in the South China Sea—otherwise known as the
West Philippines Sea—involves pumping massive amounts of sand from
the ocean floor onto reef systems around the Spratly Islands. The land-grab
for this resource-rich archipelago, hotly disputed among Vietnam, Taiwan,
the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei, is all the more audacious as its pri-
mary developments include not only a military base but also a casino.
Even as gleaming skyscrapers, luxury hotels, and casinos present a futur-
istic vision of a New Asia, indentured Burmese workers eking out a life on
shrimping boats off the coast of Thailand meet that future under vertigi-
nously different circumstances. A Trans-Pacific Partnership, characterized
by one reporter as “nafta on steroids”1 continues to negotiate for US and
European stakes in the “Asian Century,” even as national frameworks yield
to globalizing narratives that occlude the precipitous divide between the
cosmopolitan elites and the continually displaced migrant workers of the
world.
Transpacific futurities and precarities dwell on each other. Insofar as
precarity names living in relation to an unknown future, it challenges the
seeming inevitability of progress and development through profit-driven
technoscience and entrepreneurship. At a moment when neoliberal enthu-
siasts in Asia excel in pushing notions like talent acquisition and human
capital management as the path to the Asian Century, Asia’s reconstitu-
tion through interest in the global marketplace and market-mediated sub-
jectivities articulates an Asian futurity in which migrant workers, whose
livelihoods have been the most decimated by the violence of finance capi-
talism, are rendered disposable and invisible. The cover of Kishore Mahbu-
bani’s 2008 The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power
to the East (figure 4.1) presents readers with what seems to be the global
sign for financial growth: skyscrapers under construction.2 Cranes perch
atop every tower, suggestive of the “all-at-once-ness” of growth in Asia. The
illuminated construction site stretching into the night sky highlights the
unrelenting pace of growth, which proceeds even as the rest of the world
sleeps. The scene is a familiar one, prefigured by the race for the tallest
building that ran across parts of Asia—namely Singapore, Malaysia, and
Taiwan—in the early 2000s.3 But the unpainted, all white structures feel
eerily hollow and decontextualized. There is no sign of the human laborers
who welded and wired these structures. The parking lot in the foreground
is all but empty, with the exception of one nondescript parked car. This
scene of speculative building—construction predicted but not contracted
to sell—feels like an already haunted future, in which New Asia has be-
come an empty lot, evacuated of its denizens and prepared to signify the
sheer potential of capital.
Published amid the financial crisis of 2008, Mahbubani’s book and his
piece in the Financial Times, which serves as this chapter’s epigraph, de-
clare an “Asian century” is realizable. Issued in forward-looking, prophetic
tones, Mahbubani’s declaration excites what Alan Greenspan once called
12 0 - C H A P T E R 4
Figure 4.1. Cover of Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere.
“irrational exuberance.”4 The phrase, uttered in a speech Greenspan gave
in 1996, when he was chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Fed-
eral Reserve System, characterized the “unduly escalated asset values” of
Japan’s economic bubble.5 The next day, Tokyo’s stock market fell sharply,
closing down 3 percent, and Greenspan’s speech was later seen as presag-
ing the Asian financial crash a year later. The extent to which economic
projections hang on the words of figures like Greenspan demonstrates how
such speculations work as performative speech acts that call the future
into being. Similarly, the optimism that Mahbubani announces will deliver
the Asian Century structures the affective drive behind speculative invest-
ment in Asian futures. This vision of the new Asian hemisphere, colonized
by empty high-rises reaching toward limitless horizons and built by de-
territorialized workers, projects a future of automated speculative building,
fueled by investment-hungry banks. If Greenspan and Mahbubani grasp
how their respective declarations of pessimism and optimism will affect
the global economy, they do so with two different Asias in mind: Japan of
the late 1990s and Singapore at the dawn of a New Asia in 2008.6 The Asian
Century, toward which Mahbubani’s optimism strains, functions as a large-
scale speculative fiction spawned from neoliberal fantasies cultivated by
the authors of the new world order.
The 2011 prospectus of the Asian Development Bank (adb), Asia 2050:
Realizing the Asian Century, declares Asia’s future economic dominance on
the world stage as “plausible but by no means preordained.”7 But in setting
out to realize the Asian Century, the adb—an international financial insti-
tution largely modeled on the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank—could not be more explicit about the relationship between imagin-
ing a general Asian futurity and the financial speculations in Asian futures
and securities markets. As various members of the economic, political, and
public policy communities attempt to locate the when and where of the
Asian Century, something peculiar happens to how “Asia” is conceptual-
ized. Peter Drysdale, editor of the East Asia Forum, refers interchangeably
to nation-states and economic cluster entities as Asia: “Already the Asian
economies, including Japan, South Korea, China and the other East Asian
economies such as asean and Australasia as well as South Asia, account
for almost 40 per cent of global output. The Asian century is here.”8 By in-
cluding the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (asean) in this list,
Drysdale does more than identify the Asian region as made up of multiple
sovereign states. asean is an international trade interest group of repre-
12 2 - C H A P T E R 4
sentatives from Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam that attempts to stimulate
investment within and beyond the Southeast Asian region. Drysdale’s con-
ceptualization of the Asian Century revolves around market-mediated sub-
ject formations at the macro level. His language signals a shift in thinking
from geopolitical regions to economic communities that resemble country
clubs, where power is meted out to members according to their shares of
ownership.
The Asian Century packages an Asia that has been reduced to signify-
ing Asian capital. Asian people, geography, and culture recede to the back-
drop of a global financial stage where the economy becomes the protago-
nist. Asia’s future has been sold. While Asian political leaders, including
Deng Xioping of the People’s Republic of China and Indian Prime Min-
ister Rajiv Gandhi, first proffered the term “Asian Century” in the 1980s,
Mahbubani—Singapore’s former ambassador to the United Nations—
perpetuates the belief that Asia will take center stage in the world’s econ-
omy. Drysdale’s situating of the Asian Century in an economic region also
acutely narrows the understanding of “Asia” and indicates clearly that in
Asian futures, only global elites will matter. What does it mean to speak of
the Asian Century in a celebratory or triumphalist manner? Drysdale’s re-
duction of “Asia” to mean “Asian economies” signals a broader myopia in
measurements of national wealth and affluence in terms of gross domestic
product, which fails to account for great discrepancies in wealth among a
nation’s population.
Although the adb declares that “Asia’s future is in its own hands,”9 the
Bank is made up of sixty-seven member countries, of which only forty-eight
are from “within Asia and the Pacific,” while the remaining nineteen are
from “outside.”10 Australia and New Zealand both count as “within Asia
and the Pacific,” whereas the United States and European countries are
“outside.” This sorting handily overlooks Guam and Hawaii as instances in
which the United States could be considered to be “within” rather than be-
yond Asia. Reviewing the list of regional members (which include Bangla-
desh, Fiji, India, the Marshall Islands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Samoa, Sri
Lanka, Vanuatu, and Vietnam, as well as Afghanistan—a founding member
of the adb in 1966, but tellingly absent from the bank’s membership be-
tween 1980 and 2001), one reads the signs of centuries of U.S. and Euro-
pean imperialism in Asia that complicate the notion of discrete insides and
outsides of the region. It is the unsettled dynamic that constitutes a trans-
T H E C R U E L O P T I M I S M O F T H E A S I A N C E N T U RY - 123
national Asian/American space, which is precisely the in-between, both/
and condition of the majority of the adb’s members that the framing of
“within” versus “outside” works to disavow.11 In its outlining of inside and
outside members, the adb occludes the transnational even as it deploys the
neoliberal rhetoric of global (capitalist) cooperation. What facilitates and
motivates this contradiction is the hope of delinking histories of U.S. and
European imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region and the labor diasporas
it created—delinking the aspirational orientations of self-improvement,
optimization of life, and self-management of neoliberal reform from a reli-
ance on invisible migrant labor to support the appearance of seemingly
universal choice architecture.
The adb also distributed a promotional video that proffers a contradic-
tory theme of self-determination. What “Asia’s future” in “its own hands”
actually looks like is the bank’s financial instruments such as equity in-
vestments and securities, pooled into the Asian Development Fund, which
provides “opportunities for people to lift themselves out of poverty.”12 The
bootstraps rhetoric of rugged individualism imagines Asia’s future in the
hands of what Aihwa Ong would call “educated and self-propulsive indi-
viduals” in the global circuit, who “claim citizenship-like entitlements and
benefits, even at the expense of territorialized citizens.”13 Building on her
earlier work on “flexible citizenship,”14 in Neoliberalism as Exception Ong
revisits the disaggregation of national populations into those with mobile
entitlements and those whose often-forced displacements exclude them
from the ostensible protections of national citizenship: “Low-skill citizens
and migrants become exceptions to neoliberal mechanisms and are con-
structed as excludable populations in transit, shuttled in and out of zones
of growth.”
A critical analysis of Asian futurity as a discursive site can reveal points
of contradiction in American neoliberalism as it travels abroad that have
to do with earlier forms of racial and colonial subjugation nascent in the
architecture of neoliberalism itself.15 As Asia develops its own neoliberal
rhetoric, articulating its aspirational orientations necessitates the revision
of Asian futurity as projected through the racialized filters of the West.16
Techno-Orientalism, as David Morley and Kevin Robins describe in their
1995 examination of the term, names the form of Orientalism shaped
by U.S. and European fantasies of Japan and the shift in those imaginar-
ies in the 1980s from an “exotic playground” to a land of emotionless au-
tomatons.17 Perhaps epitomized by Western dystopian cyberpunk such
12 4 - C H A P T E R 4
as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer
(1984), techno-Orientalism figures the Japanese as “unfeeling aliens; they
are cyborgs and replicants. But there is also the sense that these mutants
are now better adapted to survive in the future.”18 While Morley and Robins
understand techno-Orientalism as primarily born out of Western anxi-
eties about Japan’s challenge to U.S. economic hegemony, they also sug-
gest more specifically how techno-Orientalism arises just as Japan emerges
as “the largest creditor and the largest net investor in the world.”19 What
Morley and Robins never fully develop, and what I explore in more depth
here, is this coordinated turn toward Asian futures in both financial and
cultural forms of speculation.
As Asia grasps at its own speculative language with which to narrate
its own futurity, certain problems necessitate a disavowal of the racism of
techno-Orientalism. As Asian capitalist interests attempt to harness the
valuations of privatized worth that techno-Orientalism purveyed so effi-
ciently, what other ideological frameworks are dragged into the narration
of the Asian Century? And is there another way to imagine Asian futurity
that is not always already working toward capitalist gain? This chapter
offers a close examination of Asian futurity in its various forms.
The Asianization of Aspiration

[We] need to think “utopia” differently in terms of other forms of subjectivity,
work, and exploitation within the uneven conditions of globalization.
—L I S A L O W E , “Utopia and Modernity”
In 2007, Philips Norelco launched an ad campaign to promote their mois-

turizing wet-shave system produced in collaboration with Nivea for Men.20
Featuring a grooming robot fashioned in the style of a geisha (nihongami-
esque hairdo, accentuation of the nape of the neck, elevated heels), the
ad offers a revealing demonstration of the key mechanics of techno-
Orientalism: the dehumanization of an Asian subject, a romance narra-
tive between a feminized East and a masculinized West, and a broader
preoccupation with Asia’s rise to technocultural prowess in the global the-
ater. Equipped with wrist-embedded, electric razor, the Philips Norelco
geisha-bot prepares a futuristic bathroom, adjusting the automatically dim-
ming windows and activating the gravity-defying shower with a wave of
her hand. As the robot geisha and the white man awaiting his close but
nonirritating shave meet in the shower, united in the miracle of wet-shave
technology, the commercial rehearses an all-too-familiar scene of techno-
Orientalism. The Robot Skin ad not only capitalizes on a fantasy of docile
Asian technoscience, gendered and sexualized to perform a service role
and rendered recognizable through a Western fetishization of geishas; it
also—in its presentation of a seamless interface of the human body, tech-
nology, and the natural environment—promises insurance against poten-
tial friction (literal and figurative) at the contact zones of flesh and blade,
water and electricity, East and West, past and future, local and global.21
A Netherlands-based multinational corporation, with factories across
Southeast Asia and Latin America, Philips Norelco describes itself as a
“Health and Well-being company, focused on improving people’s lives
through timely innovations.”22 Seeking to turn a profit by constructing
a future that promises to deliver a better you with smoother skin and a
nearly hairless existence, the geisha-bot ad instantiates a form of preda-
tory speculation that capitalizes on vectors of improvement and notions
of relentlessly modifiable selves. Philips Norelco proffers Robot Skin as
the futuristic solution to needling insecurities about the ungroomed body.
What would it mean to unsettle the smooth, well-managed world prom-
ised by Philips Norelco’s predatory speculations? How might an alterna-
tive futurity disrupt the elegant fantasies of smooth, continuous time? Is
it possible to take up techno-Orientalist tropes partially, selectively, and
strategically to reinterpret and repurpose the narrative relation between
Asia and technology?
In Philips Norelco’s imagined futurescape of the shaver-wielding geisha-
bot, the phallic threat of Asian technopower remains ensconced in a female
casing made available for an interface on the terms of white, male, hetero-
sexual desire. At once the sign of high techne and domesticated service, the
geisha-bot can be read as supplemental, subservient, and even beholden to
the West for her technological prowess. In this way, the Robot Skin ad cul-
tivates an image of Asia as the dependent technological servant of Western
economies and consumption. Asian modernity is represented as reliant
on U.S. and European markets. Simultaneously ahead of the curve (with
a high-tech robot) and behind the times (with a premodern geisha), Asia
is never of the moment. Fixed in time as either pre- or postmodern, it
does not exist in this narrative beyond two historical eras when the West
stood to gain the most from a paternalistic relationship with Japan.23 Bor-
rowing the stylized accoutrements of the science fiction genre, the Philips
Norelco ad campaign projects its fantasy of a future in which the perceived
12 6 - C H A P T E R 4
Asian technological threat recognizes its indebtedness and obligation to
the Western world.
The Robot Skin ad, which ran primarily in the United Kingdom and
the United States at the end of 2007, remobilizes techno-Orientalism pre-
cisely at a moment when the so-called tiger economies—rapidly industri-
alizing countries including South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tai-
wan—stood at the precipice of a second financial crisis following the first,
in 1997–98. In her keen analysis of the “Asianization” of financial crises,
Laura Kang draws a revealing parallel between the characterization of
newly industrializing Asian countries and the subprime borrowers of the
U.S. housing market: “In both scenarios, the measure of economic ascent is
greater indebtedness and exposure to the vagaries of capital markets rather
than self-sufficiency and solvency. . . . By attributing the 1997–98 crisis
to an untenable Asian permutation of an original and righteous ‘Western
capitalism,’ the International Monetary Fund (imf) and the U.S. Treasury
Department compelled restructurings, which further buttressed the right-
ness of a specifically U.S.-dictated neoliberal program of deregulation, pri-
vatization, and financial liberalization.”24
As Kang argues, rather than pointing to the dangers of unfettered specu-
lations and the profiteering on financial instruments, the “Wall Street–
Treasury–i mf complex”—rooted in U.S. empire in Asia—mapped preexist-
ing racist ideas about Asians all looking the same onto the Asian financial
crash by assuming a sameness of Asian markets.25 Blaming the instability of
the market on an errant “Asian” version of capitalism, Western economists
emboldened a perceived difference between “Asian” and “American” capi-
talisms. Indeed, this bifurcation was vigorously reinforced by Asian politi-
cians and pundits who, during the prosperous 1980s and 1990s, criticized
neoliberalism as a particularly American form of capitalist imperialism to
which Asian leaders should “say no.”26 But capitalism belongs to no one.
It is all too eager to make itself at home and adapt to whatever ideological
systems it needs to negotiate to set up shop. The adaptation, at least in the
case of Singapore, unfolds across the terrain of Asian futurity.
Future•Singapore
Since the 1997–98 and 2007–8 financial crises, Singapore has probably
emerged for the moment as the most triumphant Asian economy, cited
as the fastest growing in the world with one of the highest gross domes-
tic products per capita—an accomplishment often attributed to its ag-
gressive and perhaps desperate turn toward financial liberalization after
the 1997–98 crash. A key part of engineering this turn toward a radically
more neoliberal economic policy involved the state reimagining itself as
a city-state of the Future, which meant becoming an international hub of
financial speculation, engineering, and biotechnology. Future•Singapore
and its more recent speculative iteration Future-Ready Singapore are the
names of two initiatives sponsored in the wake of the 2008 global finan-
cial crisis by the state’s Economic Development Board (edb) and clearly
instantiate Singapore’s active reinvention of itself as a neoliberal platform
“designed to develop and test bed new ideas and solutions in the areas of
urban living, wellness, ageing and healthcare, and lifestyle products and
services.”27 Imagining itself as a testing ground, where foreign investment
might “bed” down for future growth, the EDB mobilizes gendered, agri-
cultural metaphors to connote financial growth. The Western fantasy of
Asia as supplementary and disposable, as rehearsed in Philips Norelco’s
fetishization of the geisha-bot, plays out here in Southeast Asian policy
and ideology, in somewhat altered form. While Singaporean business elites
stand to profit from offering up the figuration of Singapore as a testing
ground, the edb does so to make Singapore indispensable to global futures
rather than supplemental and disposable. Future•Singapore solicits inter-
national investments by positioning the city-state as a speculative geogra-
phy: “Companies need somewhere to hatch ideas, a laboratory to test con-
cepts, a facility where prototypes can be test-driven. We offer Singapore
as that partner-location, as a living laboratory for innovative companies to
experiment and develop world-class solutions.”28 This vision of Singapore
as the world’s laboratory for global development presents a sanitized en-
vironment, which the edb suggests is fostered through a “pro-i p stance”
and “competitive” tax rates and tax laws.29 Critical science studies might
be helpful in not only understanding the constraints of the laboratory’s
forms on its output but also in shedding light on the values, subjects, and
interferences it disavows. Following Bruno Latour’s injunction to examine
the dirty underbelly of the laboratory—the monstrous leviathan that lurks
below the promise of purification—let us pursue those anarchic variables
that disturb the edb’s smooth projections of futurity.30
The fashioning of a worldly Singaporean as the idealized inhabitant
of this Asian future involves the figurative disavowal as well as the actual
evacuation of undesirable populations in Singapore, both of which have
12 8 - C H A P T E R 4
occurred since the turn toward neoliberalism. In her illuminating exami-
nation of Singapore’s pursuit of “technopreneurialism”—the aggressive
recruitment of foreign professors and researchers to add to its “store of
expertise”—Ong describes how significant acts of dispossession are occur-
ring as people are forced out of the fold to make room for massive biotech
campuses filled with international experts and industry professionals.31 To
recruit such experts, as well as to pursue international institutional col-
laborations with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example,
the Singaporean state invests in foreign students who are promised high-
paying jobs and fast-track permanent residency status. Whom do these
newly recruited Singaporeans displace?
Singapore’s investments in cosmopolitanism depend on carefully state-
controlled movements of migrant laborers from other countries around
Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Ban-
gladesh. In addition to the disparities in flexibility afforded foreign care
workers via the stringent work permit system, which segregates workers
into high-skill and low-skill groups, Singapore also marginalizes its ethnic
Malaysian population, whose members on average make only half the
monthly income of Chinese Singaporeans and constitute only 2 percent of
the nation’s university graduates. In these ways, the promises of meritoc-
racy and technofuturity touted by state officials and reiterated internation-
ally fissure along national, ethnic, and class lines.
Future•Singapore culls and develops its flexible citizens not only by in-
centivizing foreign professionals to intermarry with local Singaporeans
and streamlining their paths to citizenship, but also by pointing existing
Singaporeans to “upgrade and upskill” toward professional, managerial, ex-
ecutive, and technical jobs (“Sustainable Population”).32 Feeling the strain
on infrastructure and national identity caused by the booming population,
the state released a white paper in January 2013 titled “Sustainable Popu-
lation for a Dynamic Singapore,” which reveals an unsustainable tension
between the need to “support a dynamic economy . . . to meet Singapore-
ans’ hopes and aspirations” and the need to “keep Singapore a good home”
with a “strong Singaporean core.” Witness here the state’s neoliberal fanta-
sies bumping up against its nationalist imaginary sustained by a (racially?
ethnically? proto-Singaporean?) consolidated “core.” Two demographic
visions for Future•Singapore—of global business elites and of a homo-
geneous national body politic—compete without much regard for those
whom both visions would readily displace.
In her compelling ethnography, Desiring China, Lisa Rofel argues that
“neoliberalism in China is a national project about global reordering. The
project is to remake national public culture.”33 The Future•Singapore ini-
tiative instantiates another example of neoliberal subjectification operating
at the national level, but the white paper demonstrates the contradiction
inherent in national campaigns of neoliberalism. If nationalisms have sus-
tained themselves through racialized labor (even in postcolonial contexts
in which racial mixing has been idealized into formulations of mestizaje
or racial democracy), Singapore’s reliance on an international circulation
of research professionals and business elites might seem incommensurate
with a nation-based imaginary. What Future•Singapore aims to do is dis-
place a racially consolidated national imaginary with a new Singaporean
futurity comprised of a multicultural, cosmopolitan elite. This new Singa-
porean future enables racialized divisions of labor to continue alongside
National Day celebrations that emphasize the importance of reproducing
Singaporeanness, while simultaneously holding the door open for a more
flexible construction of future Singaporeans.
Of course, beneath the smooth surfaces of the global as a totality of
interests, there are many glowing fissures: toxic waste dumps, misguided
debt obligations, industrial disrepair, and secret prisons. But practices such
as Future•Singapore work to stabilize such jagged terrain as one-world,
standardizing protocols, procedures, and laws: a global civil society where
liberal sovereign subjects can voice their demands, and rights and privi-
leges are always on the way for those in the waiting room of history. What
would an alternative fabulation of a Singaporean future—one that doesn’t
step even deeper into neoliberal fantasies that produce unsustainable, un-
even, and unethical systems—entail?
Reparative Practices: Life in the Gutter with Malinky Robot

Sonny Liew’s graphic narrative Malinky Robot (figure 4.2) intervenes in
neoliberal discourses of constantly upgradeable lives. Published by Image
Comics in 2011, the five short stories in the collection feature a motley crew
of characters. Atari is a chain-smoking kid with a trenchant understand-
ing of harsh realities: “Streetwise, with a world-weary air . . . [he] spends
his time busking, shoplifting, stealing bicycles and reading comics.”34
His slightly more optimistic and notably alien—or at least nonhuman—
companion, Oliver, is “as uncertain as anyone else where he came from or
13 0 - C H A P T E R 4
Figure 4.2. Cover of Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot (France).
what he is.”35 Atari and Oliver have a middle-class friend, Misha, who lives
on the fancier side of the tracks, buys them lunch, and passes along his
games when he moves away. Finally, there is Little Robot, originally dis-
counted by Atari as “more of an appliance,”36 whose perspective nonethe-
less shapes the narrative arc of “New Year’s Day,” the fourth short story in
the collection. Though the narrative voices are many, the reader primarily
encounters the world of Malinky Robot through this interspecies assem-
blage of human, alien, and robot. Cultivating bonds of affiliation that cut
across conventional categories of human and nonhuman, these life forms
practice a living-in-common against a terrain jagged with joblessness, the
apparent implosion of public education, and ecological devastation. Cast
aside along with other discarded bits of a neoliberalized economy, they em-
body the fallout of Singapore’s “reengineering” of its citizens.37 The reader
follows the protagonists as they make their way through their everyday
encounters with poverty, despair, and boredom. Even amid severe condi-
tions, though, Atari, Oliver, and their friends enliven worlds of possibility
in everyday practices of care. They help each other relocate, pool resources,
hatch plans to make money in unsanctioned ways, and—perhaps most sig-
nificantly in the context of this book—they speculate together: pondering
alternative histories and dreaming themselves into imaginative worlds that
look, smell, and feel different from their immediate surroundings.
Set in a dilapidated urban landscape, Malinky Robot revisits the pri-
mal scene of techno-Orientalist fantasy: Tokyo. However, by focusing on
Tokyo’s day-laboring district of San’ya, which remains home to Tokyo’s dis-
possessed, Liew shifts the origin point of Japan’s economic success and
underscores the vulnerability of those who were not folded into the pros-
perity of global capitalism.38 Like the denizens of Tokyo’s San’ya, Oliver
and Atari “eke out a life” in a geopolitical context that works hard to elimi-
nate them from the picture.39 Together they scrape together bits and pieces
of culture, currency, and materials from the discarded matter of the city.
“Eking out a life”—one of Liew’s favorite characterizations of Oliver and
Atari’s mode of engaging with the world around them—resonates pro-
foundly with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative practices,
which illuminates “the many ways selves and communities succeed in ex-
tracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose
avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”40
Sedgwick’s formulations of reparative versus paranoid modalities dis-
tinguish between ways of experiencing time—within and beyond narra-
13 2 - C H A P T E R 4
tive forms. Distinct from paranoid reading, which is motivated by an at-
tempt to inure oneself to potentially horrible futures, reparative reading
stays open and vulnerable to the radical possibilities of surprise.41 Though
called sequential art, comics as a literary form have a propensity for bend-
ing time across the page, wherein the space between panels—“the gut-
ter”—could represent a fleeting moment or eons of time passing, not nec-
essarily in chronological order. Malinky Robot flexes the possibilities of its
graphic form to capture play and adventure in slow time at a moment when
blockbuster films profit from ever more accelerated pacing. With sparse,
unspectacularized story lines that amount to “a robot walks home,” or “two
kids borrow bikes to visit a friend,” Liew’s utopian visions—ephemeral
and provisional—unfurl across the daily exploits and mundane, commu-
nal acts of these unlikely heroes of the future. Malinky Robot ruminates on
forms of idleness that upend conceptions of wasted time, while simulta-
neously highlighting the waste of capitalist overproduction. Whereas the
dystopian tenor of techno-Orientalist cyberpunk and the breakneck ambi-
tion of Future•Singapore both engender a paranoid relation to futurity by
manifesting either foreboding about or securitization of it, Malinky Robot
remains remarkably open to surprise and radical uncertainty. In this way,
it articulates a reparative form of speculation—one that revels in the play
of chance rather than the taming of it.42
Malinky Robot opens in 2024 atop a skyscraper (figure 4.3), where sun-
rise finds the protagonists on top of the world, not because they own or
dominate it, but because they have made the rooftop their makeshift shel-
ter. Atari and Oliver are homeless, making do with life in urban decay.
Here, “mornings are . . . stinky!!” (11). This is the surprising pronounce-
ment that begins “Stinky Fish Blues,” the first story in the collection. At
dawn, Oliver encounters not the optimistic vista of sunlit horizons but the
smell of a stagnant city, littered with signs of broken technological prom-
ises. Yet morning does bring surprising, if fleeting, moments of hope and
unexpected opportunity. Oliver and Atari go fishing at the docks and dis-
cover rare life in the toxic waters—the nearly extinct Foetidus piscis (the
stinky fish), which has persisted despite barrels of industrial sludge pollut-
ing its home. Their fortuitous catch fosters the hope of cashing it in for re-
ward, but the fish ultimately falls prey to a friend’s more pressing need to
eat it. The kids are disappointed but not dejected, as prospects of cashing
in recede to make allowances for the sharing of life in this contingent com-
munity. The stinky fish, living beyond all probability in pernicious condi-
Figure 4.3. Oliver atop a skyscraper (Sonny Liew, Malinky Robot, 22).
tions, serves as a fitting compatriot for Oliver and Atari, who manage to do
more than just survive in a hostile environment. They dare to have dreams,
foster friendships, and have adventures that actively extend the possibili-
ties of the living conditions allotted to them, even if their dreams remain
decidedly out of reach.
Likely destined to earn a living through tough, menial, and temporary
work, Oliver and Atari might entertain brief moments of hope, but the
fantasy to fly is not about ascendancy or mastery. The view from the top
of Oliver’s transient skyscraper haven differs from what Michel de Cer-
teau describes in “Walking in the City.” From the summit of the World
Trade Center, de Certeau experiences being “lifted out of the city’s grasp.
. . . When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass. . . . His eleva-
tion transfigures him into a voyeur.”43 But Oliver’s prospects remain de-
cidedly unchanged by this perspectival shift. He remains untransfigured,
looking up like a homeless alien, not “looking down like a god.” This dif-
ference reverberates profoundly across the context of Atari’s and Oliver’s
likely futures working in the construction sites that emblematize New Asia
and its speculative building frenzy. Indeed, when the two look upon a con-
struction site, they consider their curtailed set of opportunities, and even
Oliver’s act of momentary ebullience (“I wanna fly a plane!”) (figure 4.4)
seems squelched as the frame zooms out to capture the dwarfing effects of
the world around him.
The tops of skyscrapers yield only visions of unattainable aspirations and
failed promises for Atari and Oliver, but they pursue adventure nonetheless
and find in an arcade a virtual realization of Oliver’s hopes to pilot a plane.
In this closing frame of the story (figure 4.5), Liew leaves us with a stun-
ning display of reparative practice, of engaging in fleeting acts of pleasure
to carve out alternative ways of looking forward.
Together, Atari and Oliver explore alternative economies of exchange:
they “borrow” bicycles that allow them to visit their friend Misha across
town. Their mundane push toward collective ownership stands in stark
contrast to the stealing-for-profit story Misha shares with them over lunch
at “McDonnell’s” about Obiyashi Takamashuru, an unscrupulous man who
stole the design for cantilevered gears on bikes from their mentor Mr. Bon
Bon. This short vignette about bicycle thievery turns sideways when it’s
revealed that bicycles themselves carry with them another story of stolen
property.
As we learn from Misha’s tale, the bicycle—as concept, design, and mode
Figure 4.4. “I wanna fly a plane!” (Sonny Liew, Malinky Robot, 21).
Figure 4.5. Flights of fancy (Sonny Liew, Malinky Robot, 29).
of transport—is always already stolen: the very mechanism that facilitates
its locomotion turns out to be a lifted idea. Framed as the first in a series of
comics within a comic, Misha’s Ingrown Nale reveals the history of the bi-
cycle as property privatized and patented in the shadiest of circumstances,
throwing the world of propriety into ethical question. Drawn in the heavily
cross-grained and stridently scraggy pen-and-ink style of graphic mavericks
such as Robert Crumb, Ingrown Nale (ostensibly produced from Misha’s
hand but of course also a testament to Liew’s creative range) takes the
reader into Obiyashi’s demented world of ruthless corporate competition,
greed, and dishonesty. We follow Obiyashi to work on the day of his death
and descent to a Dante-inspired hell, where he confesses how he stole the
design of the cantilevered gear system. Though certainly incentivized to
villainous action, Obiyashi turns out to be a dupe, trapped in the promise
of a better future (figure 4.6). Before his fateful cardiac arrest, he reflects
on his situation: “30 years! My life, a series of dwindling offices. I long for:
the ocean, the trees, the breadth [sic] of my children as yet unborn. Today,
though, will be a day different from days before” (45). We witness this cor-
porate wonk’s perpetually fruitless drive toward upward mobility in sev-
eral key details. Obiyashi’s namesake might ironically be Obayashi Global,
the Japanese multinational construction corporation behind the building
of Tokyo Sky Tree, the world’s tallest broadcasting tower. Obiyashi’s ascent
in the corporate elevator leads him to a dead-end cube of an office. In his
futile attempt to climb out of hell, he maniacally exclaims: “They gave me
an office! They gave me a car! And a hat to wear for when it got windy!”
(48). In these exclamations we hear the despair wrought by this subject’s
investments in “aspirational normativity”:44 a perpetually upskilled life,
heteronormative reproductive futurity, and a drive toward individualistic
achievement. Obiyashi has spent years subjected to the “good life” logics
of neoliberal capitalism—the logics that rationalize financial and social
speculations privileging profit for the few over more disposable lives that
don’t fit or aspire to the same narrative.
The astonishing and inspiring element of the Malinky Robot stories is
their commitment to disarming the seduction of neoliberal ascension and
individualism in favor of cultivating extended practices of care and more
inclusive notions of family and collective responsibility. In figure 4.7, we
see Oliver’s comic strip embedded within the larger comic world of Ma-
linky Robot. “Hi-Life” features two construction workers on their lunch
break, sitting on a beam high up in a skyscraper, evocative of Charles Clyde
13 8 - C H A P T E R 4
Figure 4.6. “A series of dwindling offices” (Sonny Liew, Malinky Robot, 45).
Figure 4.7. “Hi-life” (Sonny Liew, Malinky Robot, 54).
Ebbets’s famous photograph, Lunch atop a Skyscraper, shot at New York
City’s Rockefeller Center in 1932. In both examples, the drama revolves
around the precariousness of high-rise construction work. Without har-
nesses, the workers seem alarmingly casual about their safety. Unlike the
Depression-era photo, though, the display of risk in Oliver’s version has
not been staged by corporate interest to promote the building of another
Rockefeller skyscraper. Neither is the uncertainty of a person’s future con-
tained by a narrative about the importance of saving. Liew opts, instead,
to stay with the awkwardness of uncertainty, as one of the workers admits
that he spends all his money on alcohol. In Malinky Robot, a post–financial
crash story, putting money in a savings or interest-bearing retirement ac-
count might actually be more foolish than squandering one’s earnings on
the pleasure of daily drinking. The snippet demonstrates Liew’s purposive
undercutting of the “good life” promise—a promise of better futures that
the act of building skyscrapers would seem to deliver. However, in Ma-
linky Robot technological inventions, whether in the form of skyscrapers or
cantilevered bike gears, fail to deliver on their promises. Oliver’s “Hi-Life”
points to the irrelevance of whether these workers invest in the future or
not; it recasts the tale of opportunity as a farce for those whom capitalism
has deemed disposable, replaceable, and ultimately without a future.
Liew sabotages reproductive futurity in a similar comic within a comic
that plays on the popular children’s magazine activity of spotting the dif-
ference. Whereas a smiling child secures the happiness of the family por-
trait in the first panel, a tombstone supplants the child in the second and
shatters the sunny disposition of reproductive futurity. Shattered also is
the very exercise of spotting differences. These images make no pretense
to similitude; with starkly contrasting color palettes—the first is in bright,
mostly primary, colors, and the second is in macabre gray scale—spotting
their differences hardly requires practiced sleuthing or careful discern-
ment of the normal from the aberrant. Refusing to engage the familiar,
normative apparatus, Liew puts pressure on Highlights’s slogan “fun with a
purpose.”45 Oliver’s morbid rendering of spotting differences interrogates
and dramatically halts the instrumentalization of fun.
The critique of instrumentalized fun stands in direct contrast to Oliver’s
preference for “irrational exuberance” over edutainment’s developmen-
tal games, designed to put kids on the dubious cutting edge of competi-
tively tracked educational systems governed by quantitative evaluation and
techno-positivist entrepreneurs. In this way, Oliver’s “Spot the Difference”
comic registers a complaint against what Lee Edelman has termed “repro-
ductive futurism,”46 a holding up of the figure of the child as the naturalized
site of political incitement. The fraught case of imagining who shall inherit
future Singapore, though, charts how capitalist development and ecologi-
cal sustainability hold the question of reproduction and futurity in tension.
Whereas a pronatalist movement in the 1980s led to a baby-bonus program
with financial incentives for couples considering having second or third
children, 1999 (on the heels of the financial crash of 1997–98) marked
the launch of Singapore’s international head-hunting program to recruit
students and professionals primarily from India and China.47 In 2001, the
baby-bonus program was reinstated, awarding mothers $4,000 for each of
the first two children born and $6,000 for the next two. More recently, at
Singapore’s 2008 National Day, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong dedicated
more than 5,000 words of his speech to discussing the falling birth rate.48
Singapore’s concern over its low birth rate—among the lowest in the
world—was perhaps most overtly broadcast when a 2012 Mentos ad went
viral, calling for a National Night wherein Singaporeans would enact their
“civic duty” to make babies.49 Set to a song in which a male vocalist raps:
“It’s National Night and I want a baby, boo, I know you want it, so duz
the sdu,” the commercial refers to the Social Development Unit (renamed
the Social Development Network), a governmental body devoted to ad-
dressing the low birth rate and housed under the broader reaching Min-
istry of Social and Family Development. That state development includes
such calls to reproduction as civic duty situates Singaporean futurity not
in the figure of the child, but in actual children. The Mentos commercial,
in its unapologetic overture to heterosexual baby making, makes clear the
connections between reproductive futurity and other speculative futures.
National Night, according to the video, also means getting aroused by the
potential of buying a $900 stroller and taking a stroll through the Gardens
by the Bay park—a billion-dollar, 103-acre public construction project that
even looks like a giant bubble of speculative financing with all the aesthetic
trappings of speculative futurity. It is against these financial forms of ir-
rational exuberance that Atari and Oliver’s flights of fancy and moments of
ebullience stand in contrast.
Nevertheless, the exuberance Liew captures in his vibrant, dynamic,
and wiggling lines also distinguishes itself from the imaginary of austerity
and responsibility, marshaled by discourses of personal finance.50 In an-
other sidebar comic within a comic, Atari’s imagined superhero Doctor
14 2 - C H A P T E R 4
Midnight (Mr. Bon Bon in disguise) administers punishment to his foes
even as he spouts after-school specials’ canned statements about health
and fitness. With each pow! krak! bif! blow to the thugs who have come
to claim the stolen bicycles, the doctor administers “medicine”: “floss
after every meal!” “always wear your seat-belt!” and “Maintain an active
lifestyle!” (60). Doctor Midnight’s recitation of sound-bites about self-
improvement and healthy living as civic virtue is decidedly ironic. For all
of modern science’s promises of its beneficial effects on the population,
these pledged benefits have passed over Oliver and Atari, who seem wholly
unmoved by overtures to longevity and prosperity. As the sworn defender
of street urchins, Doctor Midnight interrogates for whom these logics of
prolonging life are designed. After dispatching his adversaries, he rebukes
the thin assurances of better tomorrows: “Who builds the cities? By whose
sweat, by whose blood?? And in return to ask nothing but a roof over their
heads. . . . Seeking merely to manage from day to day . . . in these times of
unending change . . . and in the bitter end to shuffle into the darkness of
this mortal coil that binds us all. What is it that awaits us beyond that final
frontier? What indignities, what sorrows? What semblance of this hell
that we have already tasted on this cruel earth?” (61). The city of the future
does not provide a roof over the heads of those who built it. Oliver and
Atari “manage from day to day” by squatting in makeshift shelters either on
rooftops or in abandoned “McDonnell’s” sites, making do with the materi-
als of dilapidated futurity. Doctor Midnight’s closing monologue alludes
to the oscillatory quality of Hamlet’s considerations “to be or not to be.”
The allusion helps illuminate the relationship between life and futurity—
“perchance to dream”—and insists on the importance of thinking of the
future as contested and critical terrain.
If they were to buy into the aspirations of upward mobility and the
gleaming promises of Asian futurity, Oliver and Atari would partake in
what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.” Berlant investigates
“what happens to fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a
landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expec-
tation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’
that adjustment seems like an accomplishment.”51 In many ways, Malinky
Robot sketches out in haunting beauty the condition of “living in crisis,”52
wherein we encounter Atari and Oliver negotiating “the impasse” of every-
day crisis in their temporary shelters and tender socialities.53 In Atari and
Oliver’s daily exploits, we find a sustained rumination on the caring re-
Figure 4.8. Doctor Midnight’s soliloquy (Sonny Liew, Malinky Robot, 61).
lationship between two truant geeks who aspire “toward and beyond sur-
vival,” but in ways that move “toward an opening that does not involve re-
habituation, the invention of new normativities, or working through and
beyond trauma.”54
Rather than eschewing Asian futurity in the face of techno-Orientalism,
Malinky Robot follows Berlant’s injunction “to imagine better economies of
intimacy and labor.”55 Launched from within a “McDonnell’s” where Atari
and Oliver have scored a free lunch from their friend Misha, this series
of embedded comics, which include Misha’s story of the theft of Mr. Bon
Bon’s intellectual property, Oliver’s Sunday funnies about joblessness and
curtailed futures, and Atari’s Doctor Midnight superhero comic, allows in-
credible artistry and imaginative storytelling to unfurl against the back-
drop of Super size french fries and the multinational reach of corporations
like McDonald’s. As the friends return to their neighborhood on their bor-
rowed bicycles, they run into Mr. Bon Bon, whose backstory they’ve just
learned over lunch. In the closing full-page panel of “Bicycles,” we see Bon
Bon crouch to inspect the cantilevered gear, the sign of all that could have
been. But, as the ordinary hero, Mr. Bon Bon simply asks if the kids are
hungry and suggests a new noodle place where they can eat, “his treat.”
In the cruel world of foreclosed opportunities, where Mr. Bon Bon works
construction even though his invention could have gained him access to
a life of financial security and relative comfort, Liew’s story bears witness
to the startling willingness to cultivate tender ties in precarious times. Ma-
linky Robot posits an alternative to cruel optimism—call it a queer exuber-
ance—that persists not only in the queer kinships Misha, Atari, Oliver, and
Mr. Bon Bon form amid conditions of contingency and precarity, but also
in Liew’s ekphrastic exercise that restores texture to Asian futurity when
techno-Orientalism works to smooth over the vicissitudes of neoliberal-
ism. As Singapore relies increasingly on temporary migrant workers, its
flexible accumulation trades on the cruelly optimistic drive toward a good
life and the promise of an Asian futurity that will never arrive for the vast
majority of the workers who sustain the wealth of the few. Malinky Robot
imagines otherwise.
5
S A LT F I S H F U T U R E S The Irradiated Transpacific

and the Financialization of the Human Genome Project
The pedigree of the clone is subaltern.

—S A R A H F R A N K L I N , Dolly Mixtures
The Irradiated Transpacific: Afterlives of the American Lake

Fish are the canaries in the coal mine of irradiated water. In 1946, scientists
began studying the biological effects of America’s fourth and fifth nuclear
explosions (after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki) on a wide variety of test
animals in and around the Marshall Islands. To measure levels of radiation
in the blast area of the Baker bomb, scientists developed what is called a
fish radio-autograph, made by slicing a small fish in half, drying it, and
then placing it insides-down on a photographic plate, which would regis-
ter the radioactivity present in its tissues. The fish would essentially make
its own x-ray, with the exposed film rendering the radioactive outline of its
scales and organs.1 Because almost all the fish in the area were found to be
radioactive, and because their bellies gave off a concentrated glow, scien-
tists were able to deduce that these fish were not only irradiated themselves
but were also ingesting radioactive plankton and algae. Radiation sickness,
they concluded, could be passed on from species to species like an epi-
zootic. Another scene of pollution takes shape in the North Pacific Gyre,
where plastic particulates outweigh plankton six to one, forming what has
come to be known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is an aqueous
wasteland also haunted by the specters of nuclear warfare—the afterlives
of bomb detonations not only at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also at the
Enewetak and Bikini Atolls, as well as Christmas and Johnston Islands.
This chapter looks to the horizon of the Pacific Ocean—the body of
water, the aquatic organisms that inhabit it, the islands in it and their human
denizens, as well as the nation-states and multinational corporations that
parlay across it—to help shift imaginings of transpacific futures away from
their current orientation toward economic profit and militarized occupa-
tion. If “future-ready” Singapore declares itself to be the new world order’s
laboratory (as discussed in chapter 4), it does so without acknowledging
the calamitous ways in which the Pacific has already served as the site for
actual U.S. military science laboratories since the 1940s (and as a location
of European imperialist scientific exploration and fantastic speculation for
hundreds of years prior to that). After World War II, many Pacific islands
functioned as “radiation ecology” laboratories for the Atomic Energy Com-
mission.2 There were over forty nuclear weapons tests on the Enewetak
Atoll, for example, during a ten-year period beginning in 1948.3
The transformation of the Pacific Ocean into a radiation laboratory oc-
curred as part of the transfer of imperial power in the region from Japan to
the United States following World War II. In April 1945, a new diplomatic
form called a “strategic trust” took shape to provide internationally recog-
nized legal grounds for the development of U.S. military bases all around
Micronesia.4 “This innovation,” writes Kimie Hara, “would enable the USA
to do legally what Japan had done illegally.”5 Unlike other trust territories,
a strategic trust meant that the administration of the region would be over-
seen by the United Nations Security Council, where the United States had
a veto, rather than the UN General Assembly, thus enabling “American con-
trol under a United Nations façade.”6 Born out of the contradictory needs
for the U.S. to distinguish itself from older forms of imperialism while also
establishing military domination in the region, the strategic trust invoked
securitization and the “uncertainty of the future” in the face of rising ten-
sions with the Soviet Union as the occasion for military fortification and
cultural assimilation in the Pacific theater.7 The strategic trust, in other
S A LT F I S H F U T U R E S - 147
words, was part of a broader turn to securitization at the outset of the Cold
War and became an early instantiation of policy based on probable out-
comes, preemptive impulses, and of speculation as modality.
When the UN Security Council officially established the Trust Territory
of the Pacific Islands (ttpi) in April 1947, the strategic trust became the
geo-political framework that would also provide the ideological and epis-
temological basis for the area of the U.S. nuclear testing initiative referred
to as the Pacific Proving Ground. While there is much more to say about
the strategic trust as a new, speculative, political form, for the sake of this
chapter, I call attention to its emergence to signal how the transformation
of the Pacific Ocean into a nuclear testing ground was parlayed into gov-
ernmental projects for the remaking of life itself. Because of the nearly con-
tinuous nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, trace elements of the Cold
War nuclear project now saturate the biosphere and create an atomic signa-
ture found not only in organisms but also in soils and waterways. These ele-
ments constitute an irradiated transpacific, and it is from the perspective
of this bio-ecological undercommons that this chapter attempts to imagine
a future beyond the proliferation of military and economic domination.
More specifically, I examine the ways in which radiation and mutation
have been key players in shaping the economic and ecological place of the
transpacific in the world. First, I examine the rhetorical and ideological
conversion of the Human Genome Project (hgp) from research on muta-
tion to a project with promises of regeneration to reveal the financialization
of genomics as it is tethered to U.S. imperialism in the Pacific. Then I turn
to Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, a twenty-first century work of queer, Asian
Canadian speculative fiction that takes up questions about the future of
genomics while also revisiting longer histories of transpacific movements
of biocapital. By bringing these quite different sets of texts—historical,
scientific, and literary—into conversation, I make a series of claims. The
first is that the geopolitical context and ideological occasion for scientific
research (be it anxieties about nuclear fallout after the bombing of Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki, or the post–Cold War race to map the human ge-
nome) matter. The second claim has to do with the changing infrastructure
for scientific research funding and a turn toward measurable outcomes and
accounting of scientific experiments that turns the orientation of scientific
research always toward the future. In that shift in funding structures and
temporal orientation, the historical narrative gets revised and sanitized in
order to make the future projections seem logical. In other words, certain
14 8 - C H A P T E R 5
historical excisions and erasures occur to make the histories of mainstream
science seem less messy. Official projections of the future too often obfus-
cate possible divergence or aberration. Salt Fish Girl takes up the project of
revising the histories and projections of genomics, extrapolating from the
perspectives of the discarded elements of transpacific global capitalism.
Set in a world shaped by predatory speculations that capitalize on the
exploitation of biomatter, Salt Fish Girl calls attention to how disavowed
histories of war trauma, labor exploitation, and ecological fallout inform
a genetically modified future of corporate enclosures on the one hand and
mutant assemblages on the other. Lai’s queer, mutant-clone protagonists
suffer from a “dreaming disease” that renders all genetically modified or-
ganisms susceptible to reliving historical traumas, and it is through this
shared, transgenic experience that they come together to sabotage the
ideological and material systems of genetic engineering that would excise
them as unpredictable aberrations from corporate subjection (54).8
Set both in China before the Shang dynasty and in the Pacific Northwest
of the near future, the novel structurally oscillates between past and future-
present, eventually folding time and subject in on themselves, disrupting
expectations of linear progression. I read these literary moves through the
queer analytics of “genetic drag” and “temporal drag” as forms of antiposi-
tivist speculations that unsettle the financialized future.9 As an extended
rumination on transgenic life and as a literary experiment in transtempo-
ral narrative, Salt Fish Girl imagines a postgenomic world that may very
well configure a Deleuzian “dividual” of econometric calculation and bio-
metric accounting, but that may also open onto unpredictable experiences
of the sort that Dana Luciano and Mel Chen call “queer inhumanisms,”
through which the normative category of the human is called into ques-
tion.10 To write these bodies into the future, Lai must intervene in a neo-
liberal futurity that promises genetically modifiable lives for some while
dispossessing others of a stakehold in that temporal geography.
I focus my analysis around the central figures of Lai’s novel—the trans-
genic fish and the Asian clone worker—against the backdrop of the racial-
ized histories of genomics, the financialization of science, and transpacific
labor. To fill in that backdrop, I provide an interlude in which I put Salt
Fish Girl in conversation with a different kind of speculative writing in the
form of the 2011 strategic plan of the National Human Genome Research
Institute (nhgri) for the future of human genome research. I compare the
plan to the key 1989 special issue of Genomics that crafted an origin story of
the hgp particularly well suited to set up a progress narrative. In this com-
parison, I trace the rhetorical shifts in genomics research from a focus on
mutation to one on regeneration and underline how funding for the hgp
capitalized on a conversion of atomic age radiation trauma into the poten-
tial for gene therapy. By putting Lai’s speculative fiction into conversation
with these genomic speculative narratives, I approach genomic futurity as
contested terrain, where Salt Fish Girl offers a revisitation of the “specters
of the Pacific” that haunt the hgp’s transpacific future.11
Speculating on Salt Fish Futures

Salt Fish Girl arose out of the confluence of several major events that Lai en-
countered in current events between roughly 1995 to 2000. These highly
news-mediated occasions, as Lai recounts, include:
the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the arrival of three rusty ships from
China on the West Coast of British Columbia carrying around 600
Chinese migrant labourers, Monsanto’s suing of a farmer whose ca-
nola crop, probably through natural pollination, had picked up some
of Monsanto’s altered dna, the patenting of slightly modified bas-
mati rice by a large Texas corporation, the construction of Celebra-
tion, a fully planned ur-American town, by Disney.12
Lai’s list provides a curation of promiscuous movements of biomatter,
any one of which could plausibly masquerade as science fiction elements:
cloned sheep, aliens mysteriously washing ashore, and a plant species ge-
netically modified to colonize indigenous crops. Furthermore, this range
of life forms constitutes a transpacific undercommons, a pooling of ab-
jected biomatter caught up in and displaced by the currents of transpacific
exchange. In the late 1990s, that transpacific exchange is marked in par-
ticular by a global narrativization of Asia’s financial “crisis” of 1997–98 and
subsequent “recovery.”13 In the case of Salt Fish Girl, speculative fiction
understands financial speculation as not just context, but as “co-text.”14
Scientific speculation, technological forecasting, and promissory
futures transform “basic science” (not to be mistaken for innocent or pure
science) into an “entrepreneurial science,” in which scientific inquiry fol-
lows an economy of deliverable outcomes and profitable goods rather than
perhaps a less manufactured curiosity.15 In an entrepreneurial approach to
15 0 - C H A P T E R 5
science, narratives of futurity function as scripts in laboratory protocols,
military strategies of preemption, and economic extrapolations alike, in-
strumentalizing the speculative mode by attaching it to funding mecha-
nisms that call on scientists to anticipate and project the potential impact,
benefit, and even profit their research might have in the future.
These resulting prospectuses constitute forms of speculative narration,
and as Colin Milburn suggests, “we have yet fully to take on the manifold
ways these practices interrelate with the predominant mode of speculative
narration in the modern era—namely, science fiction.”16 Milburn points
out scientists’ active disavowal of any substantive relationship their work
might have to the literary genre of science fiction. Eschewed from the spa-
tial construction of the pure and rational laboratory, science fiction seems
nonetheless already part of the scientific process of imagining possibilities.
If, however, the scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematical
(stem) fields remain oversaturated by white men, science fiction—with
its possibly more successful recruitment of writers of color, queer think-
ers, and women—might offer not only some explanation of historical ex-
clusions and abuses of, say, imperial science, but also gesture toward how
science itself might begin to imagine other kinds of possible futures.
In its counterimagining of genetic recombination’s potential, Salt Fish
Girl in particular proffers a politics of mutation rather than regeneration.
Whereas regeneration’s aim is to restore a body to an original or norma-
tive state, mutation finds its expression in changing the materiality of a
thing, likely in ways that alter conceptualizations of bodies, differentia-
tion, origins, and copies. Lai constructs a transgressive set of possibilities
in mutation and its unpredictability in an era of rampant genetic modifica-
tion (gm) that is marketed for its precision and control. Anchored by twin
narrators located in different times—one in the past and the other in the
future—the novel slips between temporal streams. For example, just when
the year 2044 holds up the regenerative potential of bioengineered futurity,
Lai’s slipstream techniques point the reader to the histories of biocolonial-
ism and even older forms of empire that have given rise to this dubiously
manufactured future.17 In this way, Salt Fish Girl as speculative fiction rumi-
nates on two forms of future making: fabrication and fabulation, wherein
the distinction and the tension seem to be their relationships to actualiza-
tion—either the realizing of potential or the opening of possibility.
The Ghostly Matter of Transgenic Organisms
In Lai’s speculative fiction, the future promised by advances in dna re-
combination techniques is always already haunted by the past. Miranda
Ching, one of the not-quite-human protagonists, is a “child afflicted by his-
tory” (70). She, like many of the other genetically modified inhabitants of
this mutant future, exhibits symptoms of the “dreaming sickness,” a mys-
terious malady speculated to be a “new breed of auto-immune diseases,
related to genetic and other industrial modifications to our food supply,”
wherein people become consumed with the experience of traumatic his-
tories of war, famine, and violence (69). Miranda relates the story of one
girl “who smelled of cooking oil, who remembered all the wars ever fought.
She could recall and recount every death, every rape, every wound; every
moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ances-
tral lineage” (85). The dreaming sickness instantiates what Avery Gordon
calls “memory as haunting,” the return of the repressed, and in this case
the ghostly matter has been spliced into one’s dna—a condition that ren-
ders the host a ghost, producing a primordial urge to drown rather than re-
live the disavowed experience of violence.18 Also called the “drowning dis-
ease,” this condition becomes so unbearable that its sufferers can find relief
only when submerged underwater (85). The girl who smelled of cooking oil
walked into the ocean and never returned. Miranda retreats to the bath-
tub. Traumatic experiences find their afterlives in transgenic forms, the
constant undertow of such memories driving some to oblivion but others
toward revolutionary pursuits.
People with dreaming sickness develop fistulas behind their ears. In
medical discourse, a fistula often manifests at a site of trauma, forming “an
abnormal connection between an organ, vessel, or intestine and another
structure.”19 In Salt Fish Girl, fistulas “served the function of memory, re-
calling a time when we were more closely related to fish, a time when the
body glistened with scales and turned in the dark, muscled easily through
water” (107–8). As a symptom of the dreaming sickness, fistulas form at the
site of a temporal rift, almost always behind the ears in this novel—which
suggests some play on vestigial gills that might result from the “abnormal
connection” of saltwater carp and human dna in the trans-species genetic
splicing that went into the genetic composition of the clone workers.
Fistulas also become a site of queer desire. Miranda describes her first
kiss with Evie, the clone worker turned anarchist-activist: “I took her cold
15 2 - C H A P T E R 5
hand and pulled it under my T-shirt, pressed my nose and mouth to the
soft space behind her ear. The smell of salt fish was unmistakable” (161).
Lai transforms the fistula into a site of queer desire and transpecies con-
nection. Because fistulas also recall the history of J. Marion Sims’s surgical
experimentation on slave women and the dubious origins of modern repro-
ductive science,20 black feminist critique of medical experimentation on
the bodies of dispossessed, enslaved women and an attendant theorization
of an insurgent, monstrous female social subject.21
These ghostly matters point to the ways in which the genomic dystopia of
Miranda’s world is a continuation of the necropolitical past.22 Nextcorp, the
multinational corporation that produces the clone laborers of the novel’s
near future, “bought out the Diverse Genome Project around the same time
[Miranda] was born. . . . It focused on the peoples of the so-called Third
World, Aboriginal peoples, and peoples in danger of extinction,” and as a
result all the factory workers have brown eyes and black hair (160). In Salt
Fish Girl, the genetic engineering that produces clone workers of the future
draws on the already racialized logics of the biobank. The dreaming sick-
ness becomes Lai’s vehicle for positioning the intertwined histories of war,
labor, and the environment as the precondition for the age of genetic modi-
fication. In their discussion of dispossession and debt in the contemporary
moment, Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva articulate the
“racial logic of global financial capitalism” and establish “how neoliberal
architectures and discourses of dispossession act on earlier forms of racial
and colonial subjugation.”23 Lai’s novel recalls such a disavowed history of
genomics and clarifies how futuristic scientific enterprise builds on neo-
colonial practices, from bioprospecting to racialized internment.
Miranda’s girlfriend, Evie, belongs to a series of clone workers called
the Sonias, who not only share dna with freshwater carp but also have in-
herited some of their genetic material from a Chinese Canadian woman
who chose to be interned with her Japanese Canadian husband during
World War II.24 This act of cross-ethnic solidarity, at a moment that might
otherwise compel the assertion of difference, subtly but profoundly re-
introduces the specter of nuclear warfare to the history of genomics. The
initial interest in developing what would become the hgp took hold among
scientists studying rates of inherited genetic mutations in the offspring of
survivors of the nuclear bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By cultivat-
ing such elective affinities in the transgenic organism, Lai writes war, dis-
placement, and trauma back into the cultural history of genomics.
Specters of the Pacific: The HGP’s Turn
from Mutation to Regeneration
The stakes of Salt Fish Girl’s revisionist speculation on genomic futures be-
come clearer when we investigate the hgp’s often overlooked historical
connection to the history of the atomic bomb.25 Robert Cook-Deegan is one
of the few people who relates that the hgp had its origins at the 1984 Alta
Summit in the mountains of Utah.26 In his original report on the Alta Sum-
mit, published in Genomics in 1989, Cook-Deegan clarifies that Alta “was
not a meeting on mapping or sequencing the human genome. Through
happenstance and historical accident, Alta links human genome projects
to research on the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.”27 In this two-page report, Cook-Deegan makes explicit men-
tion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seven times, emphasizing in his narration
how the Alta Summit signifies an important historical link between the
Department of Energy’s “traditional interest in detection of mutations”28
and the hgp’s focus on sequencing the human genome. In the concluding
sentence of the report, Cook-Deegan asserts that the Alta Summit is just
“one of several historical links between genome projects and . . . the Man-
hattan project.”29 By contrast, a report from the Santa Fe Workshop just
two years later makes no explicit mention of the original Hiroshima and
Nagasaki studies that led to the initial flurry of interest in improving dna-
sequencing technologies.
To look for the official history of the Human Genome Project, one might
look to the nhgri website, which proclaims the hgp to be “one of the
great feats of exploration in history.”30 The website radically diminishes the
project’s origins in the atomic era. Instead, the historical narrative offered
therein highlights flashpoints of invention, genius, and breakthrough. It
places the hgp in a stunning patrilineal genealogy of genomic research be-
ginning with Alfred Sturtevant’s first mapping of the Drosophilia fruit fly in
1911, followed by the discovery of the double-helical structure of dna by
James Watson and Francis Crick; and on to Frederick Sanger’s second Nobel
Prize in chemistry in 1980 for his development of sequencing techniques
in the mid-1970s. Organized around the discrete accomplishments of indi-
vidual, prize-winning scientists, the history locates the intellectual roots of
the hgp in these people and events while reducing the significance of a more
nuanced history of science’s relationship to the military’s atomic research
and its fallout. The positivist arc to the nhgri’s official history of the hgp
15 4 - C H A P T E R 5
presents a series of scientific innovations as the building blocks of techno-
logical progress. Meanwhile, the sequential timeline downplays the hgp’s
messier connections to the geopolitical contexts to which this research was
attached, including but not limited to what Cook-Deegan called the “hap-
penstance”31 of Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, and nuclear holocaust.
The nhgri’s selective forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also sig-
nals the instrumentalization of Japanese survivors of the nuclear blasts
and their descendants on behalf of genomic science, which at its inception
sought to align its interests with a more profitable demographic than the
survivors of nuclear warfare. When Jodi Kim writes about the U.S. govern-
ment prohibiting staff members of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission
from treating the Japanese subjects whom they were studying, she recog-
nizes the ways in which wartime targets become objects of state knowl-
edge.32 Such targeting and objectifying, I would argue, are twin functions
of the same practice of biopolitical subjection, the “reducing of others to
data.”33 This realignment included a reorientation of scientific research
toward the financial sector, in which speculations on the hgp’s potential
to predict and preempt disease and genetic defects would ultimately be-
come the source of prolific financial speculation—wherein venture capital-
ists could bet on scientific research and its conversion into private-sector
enterprises like individualized genetic sequencing services such as those
offered by 23andme.com.
To the extent that the hgp’s official narrative attempts to fold the story
of nuclear devastation into a narrative arc of the possibility of regenera-
tive medicine, the renarrativization capitalizes on the proleptic logic the
United States used to rationalize the dropping of atomic bombs to begin
with. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were supposed to have, according to the
narrative produced by American exceptionalism, liberated the rest of the
world from the potential threat of Soviet nuclear imperialism. This “fan-
tasmatic representation of nuclear holocaust in the future anterior” in-
augurated the national security state that is now primed for all kinds of
speculations on potential futures against which the nation can mobilize
and militarize.34 Similarly, the hgp presents itself as securitization against
the onslaught of an uncertain mutagenic future, in which investment in ge-
netic engineering hedges against potential risk. By emphasizing here the
hgp’s logics of financialization—investing, hedging, and forecasting—
I signal the next move of this chapter, to interject the emergence of geno-
mics research into a confluence of financial and military securitization.
In its attempt to informationalize biomatter and delink it from the feeling
body, the hgp both subscribes to and is constituted by a strong turn toward
quantification that helps convert biological life and sentiment into finance
capitalism’s terms of calculable, potential risk.
From the late 1970s through the late 1990s, basic science did not com-
mercialize so much as it financialized, putting significantly more pressure
on scientists to project the potential applications and utility of their re-
search to sources of private funding with the purpose of fueling a deriva-
tives market of betting on and hedging against the prospects of emerging
technoscientific research.35 Funding proposals and applications began to in-
clude a speculative section, usually in the concluding paragraphs, wherein
scientists imagine a future application of their research.36 Another genre of
speculation, akin to these sections of grant applications, are strategic plans.
The nhgri published a series of overlapping five-year plans outlining the
priorities and goals of the hgp. Plotting the trajectories and articulating the
potential future benefits of research, these documents constitute forms of
speculative writing. Reading the 2011 strategic plan reveals a striking shift
in rhetoric. The plan opens with “optimism about the potential contribu-
tions of genomics for improving human health.”37 Optimism recurs as a
point of emphasis in the document. The plan identifies the cell-biological
models that have led to a better understanding of Crohn’s disease and can-
cer as “examples [to] justify the optimism about genomics’ potential to ac-
celerate the understanding of disease.”38 The plan’s conclusion names the
“audacious vision” of what sequencing the human genome could mean for
the “ultimate control of many human diseases.”39 The plan attributes this
audacious vision to the origins of the hgp, but the origins the plan names
(which include R. Dulbecco’s 1986 article in Science, “A Turning Point in
Cancer Research: Sequencing the Human Genome,” and the National Re-
search Council’s 1988 Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome) do not
include the Alta Summit of 1984 and have already turned away from the
study of radiation’s effects on genetic mutation. The nhgri’s speculative
vision can only come about via the repression of genomic research’s ties to
the Manhattan project. It is a “repetition-as-displacement” that, at the level
of memory, anticipates the methodology of gene splicing.40 Whereas the re-
search on inherited genetic mutations garnered the attention and funding
from the Japanese government and the U.S. Department of Energy (who
worried about getting sued for the long-lasting and wide-reaching damage
of radiation on anyone anywhere near either a bombing target or testing
15 6 - C H A P T E R 5
site), the nhgri’s more audacious priorities for biomedical research pro-
claim to reach “well beyond what any one organization can realistically sup-
port, and will (once again) require the creative energies and expertise of ge-
nome scientists around the world and from all sectors, including academic,
government, and commercial.”41 If research on radiation seemed important
primarily to people who perceived themselves to be immediately affected
by the specific sites most commonly associated with the atomic age, the
hgp’s new directions were bound by no such geographical locations. The
plan’s new terrain would be the limitless future and its securitization of
healthy, wealthy individuals from risk of disease, disaster, or accident.
The hgp’s harnessing of financial backing by way of revolutionary prom-
ise helps explain a broader turn to regenerative medical science. Indeed,
Susan Merrill Squier suggests that regenerative medicine was “even more
potentially profitable than were the rejuvenation strategies of sixty years
ago, and the culture of biomedical commodification has spawned an inter-
esting new hybrid institution: the medical center that combines basic re-
search with commercial and even medical-industrial application.”42 As
Melinda Cooper’s compelling account of the embryonic futures market of
the late 1990s reminds us, “whole sectors of the economy were held aloft
on a wave of media-induced expectation.”43 Venture capitalists funded sci-
entific research long before there was an actual product to be sold to the
public. In the twelve-month period between July 1991 and July 1992, for
example, forty-six initial public offerings in biotechnology companies were
filed, raising $1.4 billion.44 Such speculations on regenerative medicine and
precision-targeted designer drugs continue today, when investors extrapo-
late the endowed value of an experimental life form’s “generative promise”
based at least in part on how scientists narrate near-future projections of
their research’s impact.45 Nowhere has the conversion of basic discovery to
application been more dramatically accelerated than in the field of genet-
ics. Cooper notes that stem-cell science in particular seeks to produce not
just the potential organism, but “biological promise itself, in a state of nascent
transformability.”46 Both stem-cell science and the hgp constitute “markets
and technologies specializing in biological promise [that] can in turn be
understood as part of a larger trend toward the intensification of futures
trading in both the US and world capital markets.”47 The hgp effectively
brought together human genome sequencing with recombinant dna tech-
niques to produce an endless suite of biogenetically engineered products
geared for the biomedical pharmaceutical industry.
The 2011 strategic plan’s articulation of genomics research through the
logics of speculative financing required not only the deployment of this
narrative projection of futurity but also the translation of genetic material
into statistical information. In its information-based approach to encoding,
mapping, and “databasing” the genome, the hgp expresses its clear empha-
sis on studying genetic populations over and beyond a concern for indi-
vidual bodies.48 In this way, the hgp’s emphasis on mapping and sequenc-
ing the genome dovetailed perfectly with the logic of financial datafication.
The promise of the genome’s manipulability took deep root in its lexi-
cality. As Judith Roof points out, “the uses and effects of textual metaphors,
such as the book of life, the code, the blueprint, alphabet, or recipe em-
ployed to describe dna . . . produce[d] a continued sense of human control
and agency over genetic processes and provided the conceptual basis for
turning genes into property via patents.”49 Roof suggestively puts Watson
and Crick’s 1953 articles on dna in conversation with J. L. Austin’s theori-
zation of performative speech acts.50 And if the performative utterance and
dna’s alphabetical codes promised the magical delivery of materiality, ge-
nomic sequencing was also trained toward stability and normativity.
The rebranding of mutation as regeneration could proceed only with
the collusion of a normative apparatus that could establish an ostensibly
standard genome whose aberrations could be targeted and diseases identi-
fied. The 2011 strategic plan makes this relationship explicit. By “extending
from basic research to health applications,” the plan suggests that “the most
effective way to improve human health is to understand normal biology (in
this case, genome biology) as a basis for understanding disease biology.”51
Imagining the healthy body meant sequencing, reading, and editing the
legible genome.
Heredity, as Michel Foucault explains in his lecture on biopower at the
Collège de France in 1976, conceptually gives rise to a “theory of degen-
eracy” and sexuality, because it “represents the precise point where the dis-
ciplinary and the regulatory, the body and the population, are articulated”
and become simultaneously disciplined and regulated.52 “The norm,” he
continues, “is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to
discipline and a population one wishes to regularize.”53 Though Foucault
delivered this lecture eight years before the Alta Summit, he already had
some inkling that a genetic normativity would follow. In the subsequent
paragraph, he cites atomic power as an example of “biopower that is in ex-
cess of sovereign right” and bioengineering (“when it becomes technologi-
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cally and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make
it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster”) as an example
of biopower “beyond all human sovereignty.”54 Foucault’s theorizations of
biopower emerge precisely from thinking about the particular historical
moment when the hgp makes its transition from the atomic age to the age
of genetic modification.
The pathologization of genetic mutation in contemporary discourse is
held over from only one side of an old debate in evolutionary biology be-
tween Hermann J. Muller and Theodosius Dobzhansky. This debate is help-
fully rehearsed in Banu Subramaniam’s 2014 book Ghost Stories for Darwin.
“To Muller,” writes Subramaniam, “all mutation was deleterious and thus
an active eugenics program was necessary to foster the purifying effects of
natural selection. . . . To Dobzhansky, genetic variation was critically im-
portant for evolution and genetic diversity was something we should cher-
ish.” Muller’s research on mutation, one must note, took shape while he
was studying the effects of radiation in the wake of Hiroshima and Naga-
saki. Radiation, as Muller witnessed in the context of nuclear devastation
in postwar Japan, produced mutations that were “inherently unstable”;
whereas Dobzhansky saw genetic variation as “desirable and linked to a
deep commitment to a diverse and egalitarian world.” The nhgri’s plan for
the future of human genome research takes Muller’s view on mutation as
its extrapolation point rather than Dobzhansky’s. Conceiving mutation as
deleterious and undesirable sets up a rhetorical shift in genomics research
from “mutation” to “regeneration.”
Mutant Assemblages and Queer Desire

In analyzing why the hgp turns from the study of mutation to the more
profitable science of dna recombination and genetic engineering, Jasbir
Puar’s formulation of “regenerative productivity” proves helpful: “Those
‘folded’ into life are seen as more capacious or on the side of capacity, while
those targeted for premature or slow death are figured as debility,” and
while debility “is profitable to capitalism . . . so is the demand to ‘recover’
from or overcome it.”55 Gene therapy—the use of dna to treat diseases
from hemophilia to cancer by delivering therapeutic dna into a patient’s
cells, often via some kind of vector—is a field fueled by its promises more
than by its successful applications. The Genetics Home Reference, hosted
online by the National Institutes of Health’s Medline Plus portal, defines
gene therapy as “inserting a normal gene to replace an abnormal gene,” by
swapping, repairing, or “altering the degree to which a gene is turned on or
off.”56 This discourse of normal and abnormal genes, along with the prac-
tice among assisted reproductive technology clinics of sorting fertilized
eggs into good and bad embryos.57
What is genetic mutation if not the disowned and unruly relative of ge-
netic modification? In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler uses drag as an example
of gender performativity, clarifying in Bodies that Matter that her point was
not to suggest that gender is performed and elective by choice, but that drag
disrupts the settling of gender on either a presupposed interior or exterior.58
Therefore, “genetic drag”—a term Sarah Franklin introduces in Dolly Mix-
tures, her queer genealogy of transgenic organisms—works to reveal the pro-
duction of genetic normativity, which assumes a certain stasis, wholeness,
and originality of the genome through analogies that, as Roof also points
out, configure dna as the “blueprint” of life, consisting of “building blocks”
of nucleic acids.59 Practices such as gene therapy replace “faulty,” mutated
genes with “therapeutic” ones, even though those practices concurrently
deploy dna-recombination technologies that might be characterized as arti-
ficial.60 Genetic drag upsets these natural-artificial, nature-culture binaries.
Salt Fish Girl examines the tensions between genetic engineering and ge-
netic mutation by looking at the differences between the two. Lai connects
the violence used to punish nonconformity to predatory forms of financial
speculation, which capitalize on the future “should” (holding the future hos-
tage to an obligation or debt), rather than lingering in what “could” possibly
come into being (holding the future open to a more radical uncertainty).
As Salt Fish Girl makes explicit, the clone, as biomatter forged in the fires
of biocapital, is the offspring of the subaltern. The techno-Orientalized
Asian clone in particular is a perfectly neoliberalized form of biomatter.
Distant and forgotten kin to the irradiated bomb victim, it is all too undead.
(Better to think of the Japanese as never having been alive than to remem-
ber the whole transpacific host of peoples—from the residents of Hiro-
shima and Nagasaki to the inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll—as rendered
disposable in service of the atomic war machine.)
Though Lai’s novel precedes the behavioral epigenetics studies of trans-
generational genetic memory via dna methylation, the dreaming sickness
plays with the possibility of our recent ancestors’ leaving the residue of
their experiences of stress or trauma on our genetic scaffolding that scien-
tists at Emory University would publish evidence toward in 2013.61 Discover
16 0 - C H A P T E R 5
magazine describes the process as traumatic experiences leaving “molecu-
lar scars adhering to our dna . . . like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely
tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes.”62
Lai’s novel also performs a kind of “temporal drag” on genomic futurity.
Elizabeth Freeman incites us to think about “‘drag’ as a productive obstacle
to progress, a usefully distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure
on the present tense,” emphasizing undertow as a simultaneously disrup-
tive and productive force in the creation of waves.63 While Freeman’s argu-
ments concern themselves primarily with feminist political movements,
they also describe well how Salt Fish Girl evokes the necessary picking up of
sediment from that which has been disavowed, the retrograde’s formative
relation to the progressive (“its forward movement is also a drag back”).64
In Salt Fish Girl, the future folds into the past—a generic convention
of speculative fiction (including time travel and quantum leaps) through
which Lai creates a nonlinear complexity of temporal dimensions, facili-
tated not through wormholes but through fantastical and queer forms of
reproduction. At the end of the novel, Miranda becomes Nu Wa, insofar
as she remembers (perhaps through her transgenic material) that she has
always been that mythological goddess of creation and figuration of en-
tanglement. As a time-traveling snake goddess, Nu Wa instantiates what
Karen Barad calls “the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements.”65
By cogitating on an electron’s “quantum leap,” which is not a leap at all but
a discontinuous transgression of linear movement, Barad theorizes space-
time as diffracted and multiply threaded through a “nonlinear enfolding
of spacetimemattering.”66 Nu Wa herself travels across time and space in
movements that signal the ways in which speculative fiction can be used
as a genre of migrant literature: abduction, alienation, and teleportation
against the backdrop of indenture, displacement, and deportation.
Lai explains that Salt Fish Girl began with her interrogation of the En-
lightenment notion of the individual subject and her inquiry into alterna-
tive renderings of embodiment and sensation that span geographical and
generational space-times.67 She writes: “Nu Wa is a hybrid goddess—half
snake and half woman. So I’m not just dealing with travel and dislocation
as social practices, I’m dealing with the hybridity and impurity of the body
itself.”68 Lai’s revision of the Nu Wa origin myth insists that we have always
been transgenic and we have always been queer. Salt Fish Girl is a “founding
myth about dislocation” that unravels “the patriarchal underpinnings of the
founding myths of nation states.”69
Whenever narratives of progress, development, and improvement
seduce them, Lai’s characters suffer the consequences. Nu Wa, who es-
capes the grind of factory work in nineteenth-century Canton, is duped by
the alluring Edwina into traveling to the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness,
which is suggestively abbreviated as “imf” (also short for the International
Monetary Fund). Taken in by the promises of “Progress” and “Democracy”
inscribed on the gates to the imf, Nu Wa begins working as a telemarketer,
selling big chances to win lotteries in China, using her Chinese accent to
lend credibility to the insider information she dispenses. Though the imf
promises opportunity—Edwina checks Nu Wa into a gilded hotel, which
turns out to be a glorified prison—Nu Wa becomes embroiled in the inden-
tured logics of predatory speculation and its empty promises. The financial
scheme of Lai’s fictional imf strikingly resembles the Asian Development
Bank’s strategy of pooling financial instruments such as equity investments
and securities into a fund, which provides “opportunities for people to lift
themselves out of poverty.”70 Once she is blamed for fleecing pensioners of
their retirement funds, Nu Wa is left jobless, destitute, and painfully aware
of the precarity of her situation.
Other characters in the novel suffer the effects of such false assurances
from financial institutions, too. Miranda’s father, Stewart, works as a tax
collector, and though “the bank promised adventure” (29) in the form of a
first-person shooter game in which the protagonist protects destitute sub-
jects by shooting down birds that burst into streams of digits, Stewart’s job
seems masochistic at best. The heroic savior narrative is a sham. Stewart as
tax collector is not protecting people from a looming force but extracting
money, which funnels to the Receivers General. In one of the game’s sce-
narios, the Receivers General appear as policemen who bludgeon the col-
lector. In another, they transform into a “gang of spindly tall children with
mutilated faces” holding Stewart’s head down in a cesspool while pene-
trating all his orifices with their long fingers. In these violent ways, the Re-
ceivers General dole out punishment under the auspices of fantastic play.
The tax collector subjects himself to assault as part of his job, the violence
folded into the bank’s promise of adventure. Stewart works for the bank to
secure a life in the suburban, corporate, gm-enclave Serendipity, but the
novel makes clear that the sheen of this engineered life, which has taken
the suburban ideal of manicured lawns and made them perpetually green,
is undergirded with a form of violence.71
In Lai’s Serendipity, the securitized city owned by the Saturna corpo-
16 2 - C H A P T E R 5
ration, genetic recombination has given rise to apples genetically modi-
fied to feed a family of four, not to mention a clone labor force manufac-
tured to clean buildings and work in factories. There, the Ching family
feels that they really should mow the lawn, trim the hedges, and somehow
expunge the stink of durian fruit from Miranda’s pores.72 When Miranda
visits the home of her friend Ian Chestnut, she encounters the intensity of
a genetically modified, augmented reality that a wealthy family can afford.
On the table, there’s “a bowl containing unnaturally large pink blossoms”
(65). Ian’s mom offers Miranda “a glass of brilliant blue liquid to drink.
Her teeth gleamed white. Her eyes were both prosthetic and had a terrible
piercing intelligence to them” (64). Ian’s dad’s “arm muscles ripple unnatu-
rally” (64). While corporate enclosures like Serendipity promise perfect
produce and pristine environs built on the controlled subjugation of these
bioengineered organisms, the novel takes more interest in the possibilities
of genetic mutation that belie the closed-system fantasy precision of labo-
ratory life. The true uncertainty embodied by these forms of life is not to
be contained by the security promised by the suburban bubble; instead, un-
patented seeds germinate, and escaping workers slip beyond the purview
of the corporate enclosure into the Unregulated Zone.
Despite an apparent acceleration of regulatory mechanisms, the gm
future of Salt Fish Girl is nonetheless teeming with unbridled, queer life—
queer in that transgenic and mutant life forms travel beyond normative
conceptualizations of speciation, temporality, and communicability to
form promiscuous bonds with one another. Clones produced by and for
the factory assembly line find a way to reproduce themselves “offshore,”
on the banks of a magically fecund river whose reproductive power pro-
lifically spawns mutation in the Unregulated Zone. The mutagenic condi-
tions of the Unreglated Zone facilitate Miranda’s conception. Though her
mother, Aimee Ling, is “a good eight years past menopause” (15), her desire
for a genetically rogue durian fruit growing in the Unregulated Zone com-
pels her to reach beyond the seemingly safe and sterile enclave of Seren-
dipity to satisfy her craving: “She wanted it so badly, she would have taken
the risk, but my father said that wild things weren’t safe. She knew that.
She wanted it anyway” (14). This strange fruit—infused with the mythi-
cal powers of generation of the serpentine goddess of creation, who has
coiled herself around its seed—fertilizes Miranda’s mother’s egg with Nu
Wa’s genetic essence. Conceived in a moment when her mother craved
wild durian, Miranda embodies her mother’s momentary rebellion against
the privatization of food. “I should never have brought you that evil fruit,”
Stewart tells Aimee. “Only barbarians eat those kinds of things. You know
if it doesn’t have a Saturna sticker it isn’t safe. Everything has been af-
fected by these modified pollens. If it grows wild in the Unregulated Zone
you have no idea what kinds of mutations have occurred” (32). Here, the
discards from the lab experiment gone wrong, through fish genetics and
through queer desire, hold wild assembly.
Nu Wa’s attraction to Salt Fish Girl and Miranda’s bond with the clone
worker Evie traverse time, space, and heteronormative notions of propri-
ety. In his formulation of a queer diaspora, David Eng provides “new meth-
ods of contesting traditional family and kinship structures—of reorganiz-
ing national and transnational communities based not on origin, filiation,
and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a com-
mon set of social practices or political commitments.”73 Queer diaspora
emerges in contradistinction to the concept of a nuclear family, with its
attachments to neoliberal ideals of social respectability and personal re-
sponsibility, and the privatization of social reproduction.74
Salt Fish Girl refuses to demonize genetic manipulation as something to
be feared or loathed. The queer gm family might even include a genetic
engineer. The novel concludes in an aquarium, where Evie visits the dna
engineer Chang. The aquarium, a mimetic site of origin, marked by “an arti-
ficial stream that rushed into an artificial pond” (263), nonetheless serves
as a primal scene that Evie warns Miranda not to disparage: “Many lives
begin here” (261). Among the queer affiliations cultivated in the aquarium
scene are the saltwater carp whose genetic material Evie shares and the
transpecies bonds Miranda feels. Noticing a straight couple on the other
side of a tank, Miranda observes: “They were not remotely as beautiful as
the yellow, blue and orange fish that swam between us and them or as the
vibrant, translucent corals that shivered with a strange, barely animate life”
(262–63). In this moment, Miranda denaturalizes the reproductive futurity
of the heterosexual couple and simultaneously recognizes the vibrancies of
Evie’s queerer genetic genealogies. Evie and Miranda seem happy enough
to consider the queer kinship they share with the other genetically modi-
fied organisms of this inauthentic birthplace. Lai’s novel focuses its critique
not on genetic modification itself but on the securitization of genetically
modified organisms (gmo) by a bioengineering industry whose leaders
hope to profit from controlling, patenting, and privatizing genetic material.
Salt Fish Girl is a story of clones, fish, and mutants who enact a “queer im-
16 4 - C H A P T E R 5
provisation of kinship” to intercede in the collusion of corporate greed and
scientific ambition.75 What brokers these alliances across species might be
described best as queer desire. Queer theorizations of kinship, collectivity,
and affinity-based politics become quite helpful in formulating the particu-
larly queer ways that Salt Fish Girl reconceives transpacific futurity.
Miranda characterizes her desire for Evie as a primordial yearning for
a radical intersubjectivity, a harkening back to a transgenic, already queer
origin:
Her fingers moved over my skin, cool and tingly as ice water. I
wanted to turn into water myself, fall into her the way rain falls into
the ocean. I moved through the cool dark with her, my body a single
silver muscle slipping against hers, flailing for oxygen in a fast under-
water current, shivering slippery cool wet and tumbling through dark
towards a blue point of light in the distance, teeth, lip, nipple, the
steel taste of blood, gills gaping open and closed, open and closed,
mouth, breath, cool water running suddenly piss hot against velvet
inner thighs and the quick shudder silver flash of fish turning above
the ice-blue surface of the lake. (161)
Desire is transmutation—a falling into water, rain, ocean, and eventu-
ally fish, in a passage that renders the transpecies turn in terms evocative
of fantastical lesbian erotica. Miranda’s slippery tumbling between Evie’s
thighs moves the reader through what Amit Rai has called an “ecology of
sensations” that opens sexual politics to “tactical but unpredictable ex-
perimentation.”76 That playful experimentation also manifests at the sen-
tence level in Lai’s orchestration of a slip from “rainfall” to “rain falls.” Con-
fusing even the automatic grammar check of word-processing programs,
the structure produces an energy of connection between the two words,
pulling multiple meanings into its quantum entanglement. Puzzling over
the singular and plural articulations of rain, Lai uses this description of salt-
fishy, queer sex to explore interconnected modes of being in the world that
call into question the force of individualism.
Improvisational life-forms and experimental practices form ad hoc com-
munity networks and resistance movements that coalesce spontaneously
and ephemerally, on the fly, on the run, and cobbled together from recycled
and repurposed materials. The Unregulated Zone is also home to all sorts of
other mutant forms of commerce and life. Pirate television, backyard farm-
ing, and reconstructed bicycles offer alternative models of communing for
workers fleeing the corporate compounds once “the stock market crisis and
the further devaluation of the dollar” compel Saturna to start cutting pen-
sions and firing workers (84). The clones who escape the Pallas shoe factory
start making sneakers with revolutionary messages etched into their soles,
sold on the black market to foment pedestrian speech acts in the mud. The
artistic shoe impressions traverse unregulated space and indicate the hid-
den currents, the sudden, unexpected connections, unseen networks, and
spontaneous associations that constitute the lived urban space beyond the
frame of the blueprint and the planned city of Serendipity, or its Disney
counterpart of Celebration, Florida. Insofar as they do the often anonymous
work of disruption, these anarchic footprints instantiate Salt Fish Girl’s guer-
rilla tactics against the imagination of a neater, more compliant futurity.
They participate in what Cooper calls a “creative sabotage of the future.”77
Postscript: Transpacific Ecologies

The Pacific Ocean is occupied. An assemblage of mutagenic and discarded
lifeforms helps us formulate transpacific futurity from below, by think-
ing speculatively from the perspective of the irradiated fish, the never-
disintegrating bead of microplastic, the Asian migrant worker, the em-
bryonic stem cell, and the disappearing coral reefs. This heterogeneous
unmannerly crowd of indeterminate actors is bound together by a shared
disenfranchisement. They have been cast as disposable service workers in
global capitalism’s transpacific speculations. By bringing together labor his-
tories of Asian migration to, from, and between the Americas with projec-
tions of Asian biotech futures, I mean to tether twenty-first-century extrapo-
lations about transpacific futurities in the era of global finance capitalism to
earlier histories of U.S. imperialism across the Pacific. Thinking transpacific
futurity from the extrapolation point of nuclear fallout demands a perspec-
tival shift that disrupts the promissory optimism surrounding how geneti-
cally modified organisms, as well as other forms of biocapital exchanges,
will deliver the so-called Asian Century. In my reading of Salt Fish Girl and
the 2011 strategic plan of nhgri, fallout serves as futurity’s remainder, tug-
ging at the sails of a more triumphant narrative of technoscientific progress.
After a six-month investigation in Thailand, the Guardian put together a
report in 2014 on the “Supermarket Slave Trail,”78 tracing the packages of
frozen shrimp sold in the vast majority of supermarkets in the United States
and Europe to the work of Burmese migrants coerced into indentured servi-
16 6 - C H A P T E R 5
tude on Thai shrimping boats, where their invisible free labor makes them
feel “worthless.” “The fish has more value than we do,” one worker says. “We
are less than human.” He—like the Salt Fish Girl, who finds work in a fac-
tory assembling tin animal wind-up toys—expresses textbook alienation.
Together, they and the fish constitute the flotsam and jetsam, the detritus, the
imperial debris circulating in the Pacific Ocean, ground together into fish-
meal to feed global capitalism. They are precisely the ones the Trans-Pacific
Partnership renders disposable, even as it calls into being an Asian futurity.
Larissa Lai imagines transpacific futurity differently. Salt Fish Girl traces
the biopolitical currents of the transpacific, bringing Asian/American labor
histories into conversation with circulations of other forms of biocapital, in-
cluding Monsanto seeds, embryonic stem cells, and irradiated fish. These
human and inhuman assemblages point to an alternative apprehension of
Asian futurity from the perspective of a transpacific undercommons. The
novel’s multiple forms of drag produce a number of interventions into the
construction of speculative futurity. Salt Fish Girl’s interspecies “anima-
cies,”79 including but not limited to the genetic drag of Miranda’s dreaming
sickness and the clonal genealogies of Evie and the Sonias, also facilitate a
temporal drag that dredges up the transpacific historiographies of wars in
Asia and the collusion among military, industry, technology, capitalism, and
scientific research and folds those histories back into the story of gm futures.
If the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the atomic afterlives
on the Bikini Atoll constitute the specters of the Pacific that haunt the era
of genetic modification, Lai’s invocation of them through the transgenic
bodies of Miranda Ching and Salt Fish Girl—through the spliced dna of
saltwater carp and Asian migrant workers—suggests the queerness of a
transpacific ecology. Salt Fish Girl is perhaps the most radical demonstra-
tion of the migrant futures collected in this book, and it seems fitting to
offer Miranda’s musings as a bookend to the epigraphs by Samuel Delany
and Octavia Butler that preceded the introduction. In the final moments
of Salt Fish Girl, Lai gives Miranda a closing soliloquy, which I am all too
happy to use as the coda to this chapter:
I thought, we are the new children of the earth, of the earth’s revenge.
Once we stepped out of mud, now we step out of moist earth, out of
dna both new and old, an imprint of what has gone before, but also a
variation. By our difference we mark how ancient the alphabet of our
bodies. By our strangeness we write our bodies into the future. (259)
Ep i l o gu e
S P E C U L AT I O N A S D I S C O U R S E ,
S P E C U L AT I O N A S E X U B E R A N C E
In an essay titled “The Rhetoric of Sex / The Discourse of Desire,” Samuel

Delany examines one possible etymology for “discourse” that stems from
the Latin word for an ancient Roman oval racetrack, where spectators
stood on the inside of the track, while the runners raced around the en-
circled spectators. These Roman discourses, Delany notes, “were places
of much betting . . . , the touting up of odds, and the endless speculative
conversation on the merits of the racers characteristic today of horse-
racing tracks were a part of daily life at the discourse.”1 Building on Michel
Foucault’s theorizations of discourse in Archaeology of Knowledge, Delany
understands discourse as a structuring mechanism that not only “tells us
what is central and what is peripheral,” but that also controls the entry and
exit points of that facility.
Delany identifies the Roman discourse as an archaeology of knowledge
that is simultaneously a primal scene for speculation. Discourse in this ex-
ample presents itself as a mostly closed system that facilitates gambling by
providing the conditions of manageable uncertainty without throwing itself
over to chaos. The runners ostensibly never leave the track. What would
happen, though, if they did? Like Foucault, Delany takes more interest in
the multiplicity of discourses, discursive practices, and their relationships
to the anomaly—that which falls beyond the purview of the discourse. For
him, paying attention to the “anomalous and nonserious” discards of dis-
course reveals the exclusionary structuring mechanisms of the discourse
itself.2 Delany moves through these thoughts on discourse to arrive at his
perhaps better known set of formulations on paraliterature, which includes
speculative fiction and all sorts of other “anomalous and nonserious” forms
of writing. And as Delany points out, “‘anomalous and nonserious’ is how
the accomplishments of women, whether in the arts or in the world, were
judged. And the writings of blacks in this country were, until very recently,
considered even more of an accident.”
“By our strangeness, we write our bodies into the future,” Miranda says.3
She’s talking about genetic mutation, but Larissa Lai also invokes queer and
migrant futurity. These are the anomalous futures that have run amok from
the discourse of speculation. Migrant Futures has been a study of specula-
tion not so much as a genre, but rather as a discursive practice. Migrant
futures are epistemological anomalies. They are science fictions less inter-
ested in getting the science right than in interrogating the systems that
produced that science.
Speculation becomes a colonizing mechanism when it attempts to cap-
ture, profit from, and realize the future. Predictions, premeditations, pre-
cautions, preparedness—these are all signposts of a speculative science
working to colonize the future. This book has located several arenas in
which speculation has met up with these imperialist logics: the financial
derivatives market, military securitization, transnational surrogacy insur-
ance, global development banking, as well as bio- and geo-engineering.
Speculation as discourse has been around for some time in various guises.
Consider, for example, the progress narrative that primes the funding ratio-
nale for Henry Ford’s rubber plantation in Brazil. I have called attention
to it in the figuration of homeland futurity at the U.S.-Mexico border. But
it has been more interested in highlighting what it might mean to specu-
late otherwise.
In an article titled “Hope over Experience: Desirability and the Persis-
tence of Optimism,” a team of Yale economists concluded that people’s de-
sires direct them toward optimism over and against their so-called better
judgment. Alan Greenspan denounced the “irrational exuberance” and
blamed it for the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s. Through the work of
queer theorists like Lauren Berlant and Jasbir Puar, we can see that capi-
E P I L O G U E - 169
talism thrives on the energy of this cruel optimism, pathologizing it only
when the market collapses to save its idealized rational subject from re-
proach.
Migrant Futures addresses counterfactual futures as they are imagined in
both apparent fictions—novels and films—as well as masked fictions such
as economic forecasts, founding documents of scientific consortia, and de-
velopment plans linked to structural adjustment loans. Rather than using
the latter as background to understand the former, Migrant Futures places
both types of extrapolative enterprises on an equal footing. Both generate
cultural fictions that then produce material effects. If financialization is a
project that turns human sentiment into data with the goal of predicting
and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, Migrant Futures focuses on the specu-
lative fictions of those populations shuttled in and out of zones of growth.
The members of this undercommons refuse to participate in, and are de-
nied access to, the ladder of corporate productivity and take comfort in-
stead in forms of kinship and occupation that survive alongside and below
the radar of freewheeling global entrepreneurialism. Their irrational exu-
berance serves them well in the struggle to enact an alternative economy of
sharing amid destitution, love for others amid austerity, and collaboration
amid incentivized competition.
To think of migrant futures is to posit that which may never come to
pass but must nevertheless persist speculatively, against all odds. Perhaps
the primary function of their existence is to hold open the aperture to the
beyond, where the systems that seemingly dominate cease to overwhelm.
The cultural texts assembled in this book explore a sense of wonder that
exceeds or runs parallel to frameworks of the knowable. These specula-
tions from below face uncertainty with exuberance, daring to stay open to
chance, in part because that is all they have, but also because they are no
longer playing the same game. They have left the track.
17 0 - E P I L O G U E
N o tes
Preface
1 Jervey Tervalon, “Sister from Another Planet: Remembering Octavia Butler,” LA
Weekly, March 1, 2006, accessed July 23, 2016, http://www.laweekly.com/news
/sister-from-another-planet-2142238.
2 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso,
1990), 55.
3 For example, Catherine Ramírez writes: “despite the genre’s androcentrism and
overwhelming whiteness, I found pleasure and meaning in science fiction. It beck-
oned me to imagine a world—indeed a universe—beyond the freeways, strip malls,
and smog-alert days of my Southern California childhood. / More than mere es-
capism, science fiction can prompt us to recognize and rethink the status quo by de-
picting an alternative world, be it a parallel universe, distant future, or revised past”
(“Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies
33:1 [Spring 2008], 185). N. K. Jemisin relates her experience of being affirmed in
her interest in science fiction when she read Octavia Butler’s Dawn, which features
a black woman named Lilith Ayapo as a protagonist (“Celebrating Dawn by Octavia
Butler,” November 20, 2012, accessed July 23, 2016, https://youtu.be/aJKwxdsxklM).
And Junot Diaz professes the extent to which reading Pride and Prejudice was science
fiction to him (October 18, 2013).
4 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Sci-
ence Fictions (London, New York: Verso, 2005), 199. Jameson revises this statement
in an essay about Rem Koolhaas and the “future city,” in which he interprets Kool-
haas’s Junkspace formulation of perpetual renovation as an “attempt to imagine
capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (“Future City,” New Left Review,
vol. 21 [May-June 2003], 76).
5 I have one of the anonymous readers of this manuscript to thank for the apt charac-
terization of the “starter archive” aspect of this project.
Introduction
1 This figure is according to the Bank for International Settlements, which has been
charged by the Committee on the Global Financial System with collecting semi-
annual derivatives statistics reports from the central banks of the eleven Group
of Ten countries plus those of Australia and Spain. $710 trillion is a “notional”
estimate that does not account for the measurement of credit and market risks.
See Bank for International Settlements, “Semiannual otc Derivatives Statistics,”
May 4, 2016, accessed July 23, 2016, http://www.bis.org/statistics/derstats.htm. See
also Mayra Rodríguez Valladares, “Derivatives Markets Growing Again, with Few
New Protections,” New York Times, May 13, 2014, accessed July 23, 2016, http://deal
book.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/derivatives-markets-growing-again-with-few-new
-protections/.
2 In his formulation of “hauntology,” Jacques Derrida argues that “if the commodity-
form is not, presently, use-value, and even if it is not actually present, it affects in ad-
vance the use-value of the wooden table. It affects and bereaves it in advance, like
the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time,
and the untimeliness of its present, of its being ‘out of joint.’” Specters of Marx, trans.
Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 161.
3 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1909), 552.
4 Marx, Capital, 699.
5 For more on figurations of the vampire in Marx, see Gerry Canavan, “‘We Are the
Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” Extrapolation 51,
no. 3 (2010): 431–53; Steven Shaviro, “Capitalist Monsters,” Historical Materialism
10, no. 4 (2002): 281–90.
6 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581.
7 For a range of disciplinary approaches to the cultural studies of finance, see Aaron
Carico and Dara Orenstein, eds., “The Fictions of Finance,” special issue, Radical
History Review 118 (Winter 2014); Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda, The Sociology
of Financial Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Edward LiPuma and
Benjamin Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004); Donald A. MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu,
eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007); Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
8 LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, 24, 64.
9 LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, 26.
11 Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of the Emotions
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 208. I am borrowing the term “data-
fication” from Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map
Cyberspace,” in AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, edited by
Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16, 34.
17 2 - N O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N
12 Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013) 2.
13 LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, 43–44.
14 Rodríguez Valladares, “Derivatives Markets Growing Again, with Few New Protec-
tions.”
15 Jeffrey E. Garten, “The Future of the Global Financial System,” accessed July 23,
2016, http://som.yale.edu/faculty-research/our- centers-initiatives/international
-center-finance/research-initiatives/future-global-finance/project-overview.
16 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October Vol. 59 (Winter
1992): 5.
17 Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 311.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War I, the first major global crisis of
the twentieth century, Frank Knight asserts that uncertainty is too quickly instru-
mentalized in risk calculations. He suggests that a “true Uncertainty” exists insofar
as there can be an uncertainty that is never fully captured or completely capitalized
by the speculative calculus that tries to make it profitable. Indeed, Knight reminds
readers that approximations have been crucial to securing “our present marvelous
mastery over the forces of nature” because “we know how to discount their incom-
pleteness” (21, 5).
18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differ-
ence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.
19 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Con-
dition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3.
20 Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, introduction to “Making Transgender Count,”
edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, special issue, tsq 2, no. 1 (2015): 4.
21 Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, Introduction, 2.
22 Thanks to my mathematician colleague Craig Sutton, who bravely gave me a crash
course in mathematical finance. For more on the turn to three-dimensional models
in finance, see Pierre Henry-Labordère, Analysis, Geometry, and Modeling in Finance:
Advanced Methods in Option Pricing (Boca Raton, FL: crc, 2009).
23 Matthew G. Hannah, “Sampling and the Politics of Representation in US Census
2000,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, no. 5: 516, as quoted in
Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, Introduction, 2.
24 Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life, 3; Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards
a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
25 In Muñoz’s words, “for queers, the gesture and its aftermath, the ephemeral trace,
matter more than many traditional modes of evidencing lives and politics.” Cruising
Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press,
2009), 81.
26 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 49.
27 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study (Wivenhoe, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013).
28 Along similar lines, Ramón Saldívar identifies the emergence of a “transnational
imaginary” in contemporary U.S. ethnic literatures such as Junot Diaz’s The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Ramón Saldívar, “Imagining Cultures: The Transna-
N O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N - 173
tional Imaginary in Postrace America,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4,
no. 2 [2012]: 8, 9, 16). While Migrant Futures’s query is less concerned with the terms
“postrace” and “post postmodern” as literary categories, I am grateful to find this
work in conversation with Saldívar’s cogitations.
29 Nalo Hopkinson, “Introduction,” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction
and Fantasy, eds. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal
Press, 2004), 9.
30 See Jane Chi Hyun Park, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and
Greta A. Niu, eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History,
and Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
31 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 12.
32 Terry Smith, “Visual Regimes of Colonization: Aboriginal Seeing and European
Vision in Australia,” in Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2nd edition
(London: Routledge, 2003), 491.
33 See Chet Van Duzer, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (London: The
British Library, 2013); Joseph Nigg, Sea Monsters: A Voyage around the World’s Most
Beguiling Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). In a talk about his book,
Van Duzer, a map historian at the Library of Congress, said: “The creatures look
purely fantastic. They all look like they were just made up. But, in fact, a lot of
them come from what were considered, at the time, scientific sources.” Quoted
in Tanya Lewis, “Here Be Dragons: The Evolution of Sea Monsters on Medieval
Maps,” Live Science, September 6, 2013, accessed July 23, 2016, http://www.live
science.com/39465-sea-monsters-on-medieval-maps.html.
34 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 40; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing
and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008). Though I reference Pratt’s
work more generally here, the actual phrase “mapping of progress” is taken from
McClintock’s Imperial Leather in which the author, like Pratt, considers colonial
cartography, particularly through the gendered and racialized tropes of imperialist
knowledge production.
35 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
10.
36 Here I am following Anne McClintock’s call to theorize “the continuities in interna-
tional imbalances in imperial power” (Imperial Leather, 13). “Since the 1940s,” she
writes, “the U.S. imperialism-without-colonies has taken a number of distinct forms
(military, political, economic, and cultural), some concealed, some half-concealed.
The power of U.S. finance capital and huge multinational corporations to command
the flows of capital, research, consumer goods and media information around the
world can exert a coercive power as great as any colonial gunboat” (Imperial Leather,
13).
37 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Sci-
ence Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 228.
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38 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Liter-
ary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 7. Suvin would later walk
back his commitment to an “innocently and naively Formalist horizon” in a 2014
postscript to his “Estrangement and Cognition” essay from which this quotation
is taken (Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition,” Strange Horizons, Novem-
ber 24, 2014, accessed November 28, 2016, http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction
/articles/estrangement-and-cognition/#ps).
39 Gregory Benford, “Real Science, Imaginary Worlds,” in The Ascent of Wonder: The
Evolution of Hard sf, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (New York:
Tom Doherty Associates, 1994), 15.
40 Benford, “Real Science, Imaginary Worlds,” 16.
41 The process of generic differentiation itself, according to Mary Poovey, “belongs to
the general history of specialization that we call modernization” (Genres of the Credit
Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008], 1). In 1988, Sarah Lefanu argued that “the plas-
ticity of science fiction and its openness to other literary genres allow an apparent
contradiction, but one that is potentially of enormous importance to contemporary
women writers: it makes possible, and encourages (despite its colonization by male
writers), the inscription of women as subjects free from the constraints of mundane
fiction; and it also offers the possibility of interrogating that very inscription, ques-
tioning the basis of gendered subjectivity.” In the Chinks of the World Machine: Femi-
nism and Science Fiction (London: Women’s Press, 1988), 9.
42 Benford, “Real Science, Imaginary Worlds,” 15.
43 Benford, “Real Science, Imaginary Worlds,” 15–16.
44 Constance Penley, Andrew Ross, and Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs at Large: Interview
with Donna Haraway,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 9.
45 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 174.
46 Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581.
47 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581. In addition to Haraway’s work, some of the
more foundational texts of the cultural studies of science and technology include:
Anne Balsamo, ed., “Science, Technology and Culture,” special issue, Cultural Studies
12, no. 3 (1998); Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward, eds.,
The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1980);
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Constance Penley and Andrew
Ross, eds., Technoculture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
48 Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship,” Gender and History 10,
no. 1 (1998): 33.
49 Samuel R. Delany, “Sword & Sorcery, S/M, and the Economics of Inadequation,”
1989, in Samuel R. Delany, Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction,
and Some Comics: A Collection of Written Interviews (Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 1994), 152.
50 Donna J. Haraway, “sf: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So
Far,” Ada no. 3 (2013).
51 Samuel R. Delany, “Para•doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon,” 1995, in
Samuel R. Delany, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary
(Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1999), 210.
52 Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 57.
53 Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, “On Speculative Fiction,” in Quark 4, eds.
Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker (New York: Coronet Communications,
1971), 9.
54 Delany and Hacker, “On Speculative Fiction,” 8.
57 Samuel R. Delany, “Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction,” 1970, in Samuel R.
Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, 23, rev. ed.
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009).
58 Delany, “Critical Methods / Speculative Fiction,” 26.
59 Mark Fisher, “Capitalist Realism,” Strike! June 3, 2013, accessed July 23, 2016, http://
strikemag.org/capitalist-realism-by-mark-fisher/.
60 Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of
Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), 5.
61 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Illu-
minations, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn (New York:
Shocken, 1968), 257–58. Benjamin famously writes: “A Klee painting named ‘Ange-
lus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from some-
thing he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward
the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence
that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the
future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows sky-
ward. This storm is what we call progress” (257–58).
62 See Geeta Patel, “Risky Subjects: Insurance, Sexuality, and Capital,” Social Text 24,
no. 4 (2006): 25–65.
63 Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,”
in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Cas-
tronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–94;
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2007); David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010).
64 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke
17 6 - N O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N
University Press, 1996); Victor Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
65 Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), 151.
66 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 10.
67 Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 10–11.
68 David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. “What’s Queer about
Queer Studies Now?,” Social Text 23, no. 3 (2005): 3.
69 (Judith) Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 2.
70 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 13.
71 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 30.
72 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261.
73 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
74 Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 9.
75 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.
76 Some of the more recent works on science and empire in the Americas that has been
particularly helpful to me include: Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technologi-
cal Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006); Carolyn de la Peña and Siva Vaidhyanathan, eds., “Rewiring the ‘Na-
tion’: The Place of Technology in American Studies,” special issue, American Quar-
terly 58, no. 3 (2007); James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire
in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Gov-
ernment: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Julyan G. Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea
of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1999); and Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting
in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
77 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco : Spin-
sters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chi-
cana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002);
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and
the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); José David Sal-
dívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley University of
California Press, 1997); Alicia R. Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cul-
tural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press,
2008).
78 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
Chapter 1. Imperial Rubber
1 In a keen and complex analysis of the colonial gaze in both Fitzcarraldo and another
Herzog jungle film, Aguirre, Lutz P. Koepnick argues that “both films stage colo-
nial enterprises destined to fail due to the heroes’ inability to escape their Western
imagination. . . . The chaotic diversity of the rainforest exposes the systematic in-
appropriateness of Western routines of cognition and ordering. . . . Herzog at once
comprehends the aporetic shortsightedness of the colonial gaze and yet in his role
as an auteur director, he reproduces the instrumental logic of his hero” (“Colonial
Forestry: Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo,” in Special
Issue on German Film History, New German Critique, no. 60 [1993]: 135, 137). As his
zany protagonist suggests, Herzog does make a spectacle of the jungle, and in doing
so, does the making of the film, which relies on the exploitation of both indigenous
actors and the local ecology to produce the spectacle, parallel some of the exploit-
ative practices of the rubber industry? Even if the film hints at some awareness of
its own participation in another form of Western cultural imperialism, it goes about
its business anyway without much change to the political economy of its practices.
2 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2008), 20.
3 Charles-Marie de La Condamine, A Succinct Abridgement of a Voyage made within the
Inland Parts of South-America (London: E. Withers, 1748), 24, quoted in Mary Louise
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 20.
4 For historical accounts of Ford’s rubber plantations in Brazil, see Elizabeth Durham
Esch, “Fordtown: Managing Race and Nation in the American Empire, 1925–1945,”
PhD diss., New York University, 2003; Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The
United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000); Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983).
5 “The Ford Rubber Plantation of Brazil,” brochure in box 1, “History and Cost,” ac-
cession #74, Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, MI. All further references to
this brochure, published by Companhia Ford Industrial do Brasil and other original
documents found at the archives will be made parenthetically.
6 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather, 40.
7 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and
the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 61.
8 Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of
Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), 5.
9 Several Asian American scholars have examined Orientalist representations of
Asians and Asianness in U.S. technocultural discourse. See, for example, Rachel C.
Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, eds., Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and
Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2003); Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Eth-
nicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10 Kirsten Backstrom, “Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Karen Tei Yamashita,” in 500
17 8 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 1
Great Books by Women, edited by Erica Bauermeister, Jesse Larsen, and Holly Smith
(New York: Penguin, 1994), 190.
11 Michael Harris, review of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, by Karen Tei Yamashita,
Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1990, accessed July 24, 2016, http://articles.latimes
.com/1990–09–09/books/bk-363_1_karen-tei-yamashita.
12 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the aids Epidemic, and the Poli-
tics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2.
13 This and future references to Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest:
A Novel (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1990), are made parenthetically.
14 See Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman, Tropicalizations: Transcul-
tural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,
1997).
15 See Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gau-
guin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Patty O’Brien, The Pacific
Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2006). O’Brien writes that Gauguin, “whose vision of the Pacific has cast
an enduring shadow on all that followed,” spent time not only in Tahiti but also
in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro. She writes: “Like so many Occidental voyagers before
him, Gauguin lusted for the mythologized halcyon days of Tahiti encapsulated by
Bougainville. At first he was lacking any substantial knowledge of Tahiti, but what
loomed largest in his imagination was a place of tropical fecundity, feminine beauty,
and sexual emancipation that waited for immortalization. Gauguin’s Tahiti was con-
fected by more than a century of Occidental travel literature, anthropology, and
art and half a century of photography. From the 1880s, Gauguin’s formative artistic
years, the long-standing South Seas myths woven from the earlier phases of coloni-
zation were revived and embellished for a popular audience of readers with a fresh
interest in the empire” (The Pacific Muse, 216).
16 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 13.
17 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell (New York: H. Holt,
1911), 4.
18 Júnia Ferreira Furtado, “Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colo-
nial Brazil,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by James Delbourgo
and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 129.
19 Nancy Leys Stepan asks: “As we look to the future, what place will tropical nature
hold in the imagination? In an era of the commodification of nature on an unprece-
dented scale and of wholesale environmental destruction; when world travel and
global networks make all places seem increasingly alike . . .—shall we then find that
‘tropical nature,’ as an imaginative construction, has itself become banal and trivial-
ized? If so, what will the consequences be for our empathetic understanding of the
natural world, especially the tropical world that we are so rapidly destroying?” Pic-
turing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 240.
20 Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation
and Transnation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 118.
21 See Kathryn Kopinak, “Environmental Implications of New Mexican Industrial
N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 1 - 179
Investment: The Rise of Asian Origin Maquiladoras as Generators of Hazardous
Waste,” Asian Journal of Latin American Studies 15, no. 1 (2002): 91–120.
22 See Karen Michelle Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007);
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008).
23 Daniel Touro Linger, No One Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001), xiv.
24 Linger, No One Home, 22.
25 Linger, No One Home, 23–25.
26 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 65.
27 A. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8.
28 George Ward Stocking and Myron W. Watkins explain how the attempt by the
British to establish a cartel in the world rubber market through the Stevenson Plan
backfired: between 1922 and 1928, the British share of the market dropped while
“exports from the Dutch East Indies (and other far eastern sources) rose phenome-
nally in direct response to the market opportunities created by British restriction.”
Cartels in Action: Case Studies in International Business Diplomacy (New York: Twenti-
eth Century Fund, 1946), 71.
29 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261. See also Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 2006), 24; Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Tempo-
ral Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 11; Lloyd Pratt, Archives of
American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 5.
30 “The Ford Rubber Plantation of Brazil” brochure, np. The quotations that follow in
the paragraph are also from this brochure.
31 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 33.
32 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian
Civilization, 1933, translated by Samuel Putnam (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986). For a helpful history of the convergence of racial science and racialized
labor practices used to manage the Ford rubber plantations in Brazil, see Elizabeth
Durham Esch, “Fordtown: Managing Race and Nation in the American Empire,
1925–1945,” PhD diss., New York University, 2003.
33 Esch, “Fordtown,” 103.
34 France Winddance Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White
Supremacy in Brazil, 1997 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001),
87–88. See also Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation
in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). In 1925, the Mexican
philosopher José Vasconcelos published La Raza Cósmica (The cosmic race), which
sets a trajectory of racial mixing with the eventuality of a utopian “fifth race of the
future” in the Americas, comprised of a bronze people, so racially mixed and cul-
turally consolidated that its members found a new civilization called “Universó-
18 0 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 1
polis.” The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, translated and annotated by Didier T.
Jaén (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), originally published
as La Raza Cósmica: Misión de la Raza Iberoamericana Argentina y Brasil, (Madrid:
Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925), 24, 25. “The world of the future,” prophesies
Vasconcelos, “will belong to whoever conquers the Amazon region” (25).
35 Weinstein refers to the influx of Syrian, Lebanese, and Jewish immigrants to the
Brazilian state of Pará during the 1920s (The Amazon Rubber Boom, 259–60).
36 Greg Grandin documents the contributions of U.S. and European news media to
this set of speculations. “It was billed as a proxy fight,” he summarizes. “Ford repre-
sented vigor, dynamism, and the rushing energy that defined American capitalism
in the early twentieth century; the Amazon the primal stillness, an ancient world
that had so far proved unconquerable.” The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten
Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan, 2009), 4. Against the backdrop of recently
disappeared British explorers, sixteenth-century stories of El Dorado, and Alexan-
der von Humboldt’s prophecy that the Amazon would become the world’s granary,
international news media characterized Ford’s expedition in the Brazilian Amazon
as bringing “white man’s magic” to the wilderness. Their speculations predicted that
“Black Indians armed with heavy blades will slash down their one-time haunts to
make way for future windshield wipers, floor mats, balloon tires” (quoted in Ford-
landia, 5). These predictions in the yellow journalism of the early twentieth century
exemplify the racialized fantasies of a neocolonialist capitalism.
37 Tucker writes: “In the face of inefficiency, corruption, and ethnic antagonisms in
the business of collecting wild rubber, British strategists attempted to grow Hevea
in dense plantations. They never succeeded in conquering the tree’s fatal disease,
South American leaf blight, a fungus that had coevolved with Hevea in the forest.
Hevea trees had survived over the millennia by growing widely dispersed among
other species; capitalist concentrations of production demanded the opposite” (In-
satiable Appetite, 233).
38 Tucker, Insatiable Appetite, 227.
39 Quoted in Cato Institute, “Hernando de Soto’s Biography,” accessed July 24, 2016,
http://www.cato.org/friedman-prize/hernando-desoto/biography.
40 Quoted in Cato Institute, “Hernando de Soto’s Biography.” See also Economist, “The
Mystery of Capital Deepens,” August 24, 2006, accessed July 24, 2016, http://www
.economist.com/node/7830209?zid=316&ah=2f6fb672faf113fdd3b11cd1b1bf8a77.
41 Quoted in Cato Institute, “Hernando de Soto’s Biography.”
42 Jeremy Clift, “Hearing the Dogs Bark: Jeremy Clift Interviews Development Guru
Hernando de Soto,” Finance & Development, December 2003, accessed July 24, 2016,
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2003/12/pdf/people.pdf.
43 Esch, “Fordtown,” 7.
44 In her examination of how Chicana writers reconceptualize space, Mary Pat Brady
suggests that authors such as Sandra Cisneros “twist realism as a representational
strategy that too easily solidifies oppressive spatial alignments by hiding the proces-
sual quality of space. Out of such twisting frequently emerge whole new conceptual-
izations of spatiality and sociality that are revolutionary in their implication.” Extinct
Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 7.
Chapter 2. Homeland Futurity

1 Quoted in Mimi Hall, “Sci-Fi Writers Join War on Terror,” USA Today, May 31, 2007.
2 For more on scenario thinking see Annie McClanahan, “Future’s Shock: Plausibility,
Preemption, and the Fiction of 9/11,” symploke 17, no. 1 (2009): 41–62.
3 Andrew Lakoff, “The Generic Biothreat, or, How We Became Unprepared,” Cultural
Anthropology 23, no. 3 (2008): 402.
4 Quoted in Lakoff, “The Generic Biothreat,” 416.
5 Lakoff, “The Generic Biothreat,” 401.
8 Patricia L. Dunmire, “Preempting the Future: Rhetoric and Ideology of the Future
in Political Discourse,” Discourse Society 15, no. 4 (2005): 488.
9 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 124. In this era of the hyperreal, sci-
ence fiction’s process “will be to put decentered situations, models of simulation in
place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived ex-
perience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from
our life” (ibid.). Originally published in 1981, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation
may overdramatize the disappearance of the real from our lives—the immediate
threat of police violence for some and the constant state of precarity for others, for
example, contradict Baudrillard’s projections of the state of the real in the contem-
porary moment—but he nevertheless describes well the ways in which securitiza-
tion has adapted the imaginary potential of science fiction to the demands of applied
policy based on quantifiable outcomes.
11 Randy Martin observes this self-fulfilling property of risk management in both fi-
nancial and military contexts: “Derivatives both anticipate and encourage volatility”
and “the anticipation of risk is always meant to be self-fulfilling, a preemptive action
that makes its imagined future come to pass.” The Empire of Indifference: American
War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007), 11, 63.
12 See Martin, The Empire of Indifference.
13 See Colleen Lye, “The Literary Case of Wen Ho Lee,” Journal of Asian American
Studies 14, no. 2 (2011): 249–82; Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhat-
tan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2006).
14 Quoted in National Public Radio, “Film Examines ‘A Day without a Mexican,’”
May 1, 2006, accessed July 24, 2016, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story
.php?storyId=5372878.
18 2 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 2
15 Optioned for TV’s Cosmic Slop in 1994, the story was adapted for the screen by Trey
Ellis and Chester Himes, both established black detective fiction authors.
16 For more comprehensive genealogies of Afro futurism and Chicana futurism, see
Alondra Nelson, ed., “Afrofuturism,” special issue, Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002); Lysa
Rivera, “Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction
after nafta,” Science Fiction Studies 39, no. 3 (2012): 415–36.
17 For an excellent analysis of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, see Rita Raley, Tac-
tical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 31–64.
18 In The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo suggests that de-
velopment imaginaries can too easily fantasize that a supposedly premodern subject
need only become a hacker to secure her deliverance from a subsistence economy
to a global future.
19 Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2009), 174.
20 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 1.
21 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 3.
22 My references to time-space compression and flexible accumulation here deliber-
ately invoke the work of David Harvey, particularly in The Postmodern Condition and
The Limits to Capital.
23 See, for example, the somewhat incendiary op-ed by Ronald Steel (a professor of
international relations at the University of Southern California), “Peel Me a Poi-
son Grape,” New York Times, March 21, 1989, accessed July 25, 2016, http://www
.nytimes.com/1989/03/21/opinion/peel-me-a-poison-grape.html.
24 “U.S. Will Permit Fruit From Chile To Enter Market,” New York Times, March 18,
1989.
25 This and future references to Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange: A Novel (Min-
neapolis, MN: Coffee House, 1997), are made parenthetically.
26 Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2004), 2.
27 Marez, Drug Wars, 5.
28 Fernando Romero, Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and Its Future
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 140.
29 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from
Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 47.
30 Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 47.
31 Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the US-Mexico Border, 1978–1992: Low-Intensity
Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: cmas Books, University of Texas at Austin,
1996).
32 Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination, 754–58.
33 Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination, 757.
34 Molly Rauch, “Fruit Salad,” Nation (March 2, 1998), 28.
35 See Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “The Mercurial Space of ‘Central’ America: New Orleans,
Honduras, and the Writing of the Banana Republic,” in Hemispheric American Studies,
edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2008), 140–65; John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consump-
tion, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2005); Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg, eds, Banana Wars: Power,
Production and History in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
36 See Jean Vengua Gier and Calra Alicia Tejeda, “An Interview with Karen Tei Yama-
shita,” Jouvert 2, no. 2 (1998): 4; Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The New World Border:
Prophecies, Poems and Loqueras (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996). Tropic of Orange
makes multiple allusions to Gómez-Peña’s oeuvre, particularly The New World Bor-
der, a portion of which appears in the epigraph to Yamashita’s book. These allu-
sions put Tropic of Orange in conversation with a vibrant Chican@ movement to
remap the borderlands, to “see through the colonial map of North, Central, and
South America, to a more complex system of overlapping, interlocking, and overlaid
maps. Among others, we can see Amerindia, Afroamerica, Americamestizaymulata,
Hybridamerica, and Transamerica—the ‘other America’ that belongs to the home-
less, and to nomads, migrants, and exiles” (Gómez-Peña, The New World Border, 6).
Gómez-Peña takes issue with the utopian cartography produced by neoliberal trade
agreements such as nafta: “We try to imagine more enlightened cartographies”
(Gómez-Peña, New World Border, 6). His insistent presence in Tropic of Orange is an
instantiation of productive cross-ethnic collaboration in the rewriting and rewiring
of the borderlands.
37 Karen Michelle Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of
Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida
Today 3, no. 2 (2010): 240–41.
38 Barad, “Quantum Entanglements,” 240.
39 Barad, “Quantum Entanglements,” 248–49.
40 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2008).
41 See Estelle Lau, Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Ex-
clusion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 169n1: “Immigration officers
on the border concentrated primarily on enforcement of the Chinese exclusion
laws.” See also Erika Lee, “Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S.
Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882–1924,” The Journal of American History 89,
no. 1 (2002): 54–86.
42 Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Reading across Diaspora: Chinese and Mexican Undocu-
mented Immigration across U.S. Land Borders,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture,
Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders, edited by Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York:
Palgrave, 2002), 72. Sadowski-Smith sees “the role of Chinese immigrants as prede-
cessors of the Mexican indocumentado” (75).
43 Marita Sturken writes: “The preoccupation with establishing American tech-
nology’s ability to see can be directly traced to the representations of American
technology in the Vietnam War. The ‘impenetrable’ jungle foliage of Vietnam has
18 4 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 2
been consistently blamed for the inability of American military technology to win
the war (hence the campaign of massive defoliation by Agent Orange perpetrated
by the US in Vietnam).” Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the aids Epidemic, and
the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 131–32.
44 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996), 28.
45 Alex Rivera, dir., Why Cybraceros? (1997).
46 Jacques Lacan, “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze,” in The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 73.
47 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 91–110.
48 de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 93.
49 Alex Lubin, “Welcome to Albuquerque,” American Studies Association Annual Meet-
ing Program: Back Down to the Crossroads: Integrative American Studies in Theory and
Practice (Albuquerque, NM: American Studies Association, 2008), 30.
50 Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands.
51 Since 2006, the University of California (uc) has shared operational responsibility
for Los Alamos with, among others, Bechtel, the largest engineering firm in the
world. Robert C. Dynes, chancellor of uc San Diego from 1996 to 2007, maintained
extensive ties to Los Alamos, as vice-chair of the UC President’s Council on the
National Labs and also as a member of UC’s five-person Board of Oversight for Los
Alamos.
52 Quoted in Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto,
ON: Knopf Canada, 2007), 300.
53 Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 300.
54 Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 301.
Chapter 3. Speculation and the Speculum

Epigraph: http://www.vulture.com/2017/01/alfonso- cuaron- children- of-men-tran
script.html, accessed February 11, 2017.
1 Alex Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby: My Adventures with a Surrogate Mom,” New
York Times Magazine, November 2008, 42–49, 64, 74, 78.
2 Judith Newman, Letter, “Her Body, My Baby,” The New York Times Magazine, Decem-
ber 14, 2008. Last accessed November 4, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12
/14/magazine/14letters-t-HERBODYMYBAB_LETTERS.html.
3 Alex Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby,” 64.
4 Bindu Shajan Perappadan, “A Setback for Surrogacy in India?” Hindu, November
29, 2015, accessed July 31, 2016, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/a-setback
-for-surrogacy-in-india/article7927730.ece.
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8.
6 Nalo Hopkinson, “A Conversation with Nalo Hopkinson,” SF Site, May 5, 2007, ac-
cessed July 25, 2009, http://www.sfsite.com/03b/nh77.htm.
7 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Global-
izing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28; Nikolas Rose,
The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 3.
8 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 3–5.
9 Rob Mitchell and Cathy Waldby, “National Biobanks: Clinical Labour, Risk Produc-
tion, and the Creation of Biovalue,” ST&HV 35, no. 3 (2010): 330–55.
10 Abigail Haworth, “Surrogate Mothers: Womb for Rent,” Marie Claire Magazine.
World Reports, International News, accessed March 26, 2009, http://www.marie
claire.com/world-reports/news/international/surrogate-mothers-india.
11 Kalindi Vora, “Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Disaggregation of Mothering
Work,” Anthropology News 50, no. 2 (2009): 9.
12 Vora, “Indian Transnational Surrogacy,” 9.
13 Wife’s name never indicated. This whole booklet is rather suspiciously authored,
in fact. Originally hosted on their website ourindiaivf.com, the url of which re-
mains linked to from various ivf blogs and chat rooms, the booklet itself has van-
ished from the internet since 2011 or so when I last came across it. Other traces of
its former existence have been captured on a SlideShare.net link: dmiller3, “Our
India ivf Experience—ivf and Surrogacy with Dr. Nayna Patel in Anand and Kiran
ivf in Hyderabdad [sic] India,” accessed February 22, 2017, https://www.slideshare
.net/dmiller3/our-india-ivf- e xperience-ivf-and-s urrogacy-w ith- dr-nayna-p atel
-presentation; and a single YouTube video hosted by “dmiller3377”: https://www
.youtube.com/channel/UC5u5n22DbZGLj40tO8diX-Q.
14 Dana Ain Davis, “The Politics of Reproduction: The Troubling Case of Nadya Sule-
man and Assisted Reproductive Technology,” Transforming Anthropology 17, no. 2
(2009): 108.
15 nbc Los Angeles, Gordon Tokumatsu, “Mom’s Publicist Sets Record Straight,” ac-
cessed March 26, 2009: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Mom_s_Publi
cist_Sets_Record_Straight_Los_Angeles.html.
16 Eli Clare, “Comment from the Field: Yearning toward Carrie Buck,” Journal of Liter-
ary & Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 3 (2014), 335.
17 Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto
Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 51.
18 “OctoMom—It Was a Very Goodyear,” tmz, accessed March 20, 2009, http://www
.tmz.com/2009/02/12/octomom-it-was-a-very-goodyear/.
19 Anne Balsamo, “Public Pregnancies and Cultural Narratives of Surveillance,” in
Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 80–115. Balsamo argues that pregnant women “cannot easily
avoid the scrutiny of a fascinated gaze” and that the biomedical gaze, as produced
through visualization technologies such as laparoscopy and ultrasound scans, fur-
ther reduces the reproductive body to an object of “scientific management of fertil-
ization, implantation, and pregnancy more broadly” (80, 81).
20 “PR Exec: Death Threats Forced Firm to Drop Octuplet Mom,” CNN: Entertainment,
18 6 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 3
February 17, 2009, accessed October 9, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOW
BIZ/TV/02/17/killeen.qanda/index.html.
21 Kathryn Krase, “History of Forced Sterilization and Current U.S. Abuses,” Our
Bodies Ourselves, October 1, 2014, accessed October 9, 2014, http://www.ourbodies
ourselves.org/health-info/forced-sterilization/.
22 Cuarón mentions in an interview that among the visual references he used for the
portrayal of the refugee camp in the film were in the Balkans, Calais and outside of
Syria. See Abraham Riesman, “The Vulture Transcript: Alfonso Cuarón on Children
of Men,” Vulture, January 6, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/01/alfonso-cuaron
-children-of-men-transcript.html.
23 María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “In the Shadow of nafta: Y tu mama tambien Re-
visits the National Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3
(2005): 752.
25 Matthew Beaumont asserts that science fiction in particular makes use of the ana-
morphic image as an estranging device, as it “posits the coded presence of an almost
unimaginable reality that momentarily obtrudes on an almost unimaginable reality
that momentarily obtrudes on ideologically constituted reality, thereby rendering it
arbitrary, ontologically inconsistent” (33–34).
26 Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantánamo?” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 833.
27 See Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2015).
28 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1988), 149–50.
29 Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Uni-
versity Press of New England, 2010), 109.
30 Donna J. Haraway, “The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order,” Feminist Re-
view 55 (Spring, 1997): 29–30. Haraway’s argument follows the feminist art histo-
rian Lynda Nead’s analysis of the engraving as a key example of gendered practices
of looking and the ways in which technologies of visual representation participate in
this uneven relationship between artist and subject, auteur and actor. (Lynda Nead,
The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality [New York: Routledge, 1992]).
31 Rebekah Sheldon, “Somatic Capitalism: Reproduction, Futurity, and Feminist Sci-
ence Fiction,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no. 3 (2013).
32 Rosa Linda Fregoso makes a similar argument in her analysis of John Sayles’s film
Lone Star: “My profound ambivalence toward this film has something to do with
Sayles’s willingness to complicate the nation’s racial imaginary. . . . If Sayles’s multi-
cultural project is to truly represent a new social order and make a dent in the pre-
dominant mono-cultural, ethnocentric vision of society, it must de-center white-
ness and masculinity” (MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the
Borderlands [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], 55–56).
33 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards
the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” cr: The New Cen-
tennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 260.
34 Lee Edelman, “The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the
Death Drive,” Narrative 6, no. 1 (January 1998): 19.
35 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1994), 176. Mercer argues that in Mapplethorpe’s Black Males (1983)
and The Black Book (1986), “the black man’s flesh becomes burdened with the task
of symbolizing the transgressive fantasies and desires of the white gay male subject.
The glossy, shining, fetishized surface of black skin thus serves and services a white
male desire to look and to enjoy the fantasy of mastery precisely through the scopic
intensity that the pictures solicit” (ibid.).
36 See Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Haraway, “The Virtual Speculum in the
New World Order”; Valerie Hartouni, Making Life Make Sense: New Technologies and
the Discourses of Reproduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
Karen Newman, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997); Carol A. Stabile, “Shooting the Mother: Fetal Photog-
raphy and the Politics of Disappearance,” Camera Obscura 10, no. 1 (1992): 178–205.
37 See Heather Latimer, “Bio-Reproductive Futurism: Bare Life and the Pregnant Refu-
gee in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men,” Social Text 29, no. 3 (2011): 54.
38 Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Lib-
erty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 6.
39 For more on oocyte markets and where IVF and the IMF intersect, see Catherine
Waldby and Melinda Cooper, “The Biopolitics of Reproduction,” Australian Feminist
Studies 23:55 (May 2008): 57–73.
40 Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum
South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–4.
41 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–
1976, translated by David Macey. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana,
General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, English Series Editor:
Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003), 243–44.
42 Dan White, “Toni Morrison and Angela Davis on Friendship and Creativity,” Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz NewsCenter, October 29, 2014, accessed June 29,
2015, news.ucsc.edu/2014/10/morrison-davis-q-a.html.
43 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and
Tricia Rose,” ed. Mark Dery, “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture,” special
issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 4 (1993): 736–37.
44 See, for example, Alondra Nelson, ed., “Afrofuturism,” special issue, Social Text 20,
no. 2 (2002). Many articles in this special issue of Social Text call into question the
implied opposition between blackness and technology that inflects Dery’s line of in-
quiry.
45 Kalí Tal, “‘That Just Kills Me’: Black Militant Near-Future Fiction,” ed. Alondra
Nelson, “Afrofuturism,” special issue, Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 65.
46 Nalo Hopkinson and Alondra Nelson, “Making the Impossible Possible: An Inter-
view with Nalo Hopkinson,” ed. Alondra Nelson, “Afrofuturism,” special issue, Social
Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 98.
18 8 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 3
47 Dianne D. Glave and Nalo Hopkinson, “An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” Callaloo
26, no. 1 (2003): 148.
48 Glave and Hopkinson, “An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” 148. In another inter-
view, Hopkinson proposes that science fiction need not participate in the fairly
common trope of colonization, saying that such a practice would be dangerous for
a people who have “been on the receiving end of colonization, and for [whom] it’s
not an entertaining adventure story” (Gregory E. Rutledge and Nalo Hopkinson,
“Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson,”
African American Review 33, no. 4 [1999]: 590).
49 The manifestations of this non-Eurocentric utopian vision are multiple and too
many to cite comprehensively here. Hopkinson does much of this work herself in
her interviews with Nelson, Rutledge, and Glave, cited in notes 46, 47, and 48.
50 This and future references to Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber (New York: Grand
Central, 2000) are made parenthetically.
51 Glave and Hopkinson, “An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson,” 149.
52 For Paul Gilroy, “the image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political
system in motion is especially important” (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 4).
53 Hopkinson and Nelson, “Making the Impossible Possible,” 99. Hopkinson goes on to
say: “when my work is coming from a Caribbean context, fusion fits very well; that’s
how we survived.”
54 Nalo Hopkinson, “Code Sliding: About Midnight Robber and My Use of Creole in
the Narrative,” accessed December 7, 2006. http://www.sff.net/people/nalo/writing
/slide.html.
55 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 (New York: Dover, 1994), 8–9.
56 “Dark Ink” essay, accessed July 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20080723171139
/http://www.nalohopkinson.com/writing/on_writing/dark_ink/essay_dark_ink
.html.
57 Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana and a paragon of wifely duty, first follows her hus-
band, Rama, when his father commands him to go into exile. While in the wilder-
ness, a villainous monster, Ravana, abducts Sita and tries unsuccessfully to seduce
her. She is rescued and can accompany Rama home after their period of banishment
has elapsed. After their return, Sita is subjected to a trial by fire to prove her purity,
because her abduction gives rise to the suspicion that Ravana raped her. Despite
emerging from the fire unscathed, Sita still cannot escape the fate of a second exile.
Rama sends her out of the country again because, regardless of her having passed
the test, her mere association with potential rape taints her reputation. In Mid-
night Robber, Sita occupies only the margins of the story. Sita, as a goddess figure
who is ostensibly never raped, has a very different story from that of Tan-Tan, who
expresses revenge as one of her primary motivations to continue to be a disruptive
voice of interjection.
58 Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Feeling Our Way through the Crises: Embodied Belong-
ings and Asian American Studies,” keynote address at “Acts of Elaboration: A Sympo-
sium on Asian American Studies in the Northeast,” Boston College, May 29, 2009.
59 Manalansan IV, “Feeling Our Way through the Crises”; see also Martin Manalansan,
“Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City,” Social Text 23,
no. 3 (2005): 141–55.
60 M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law,
Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Re-
view no. 48 (Autumn, 1994): 6.
61 New Half-Way Tree bears a striking resemblance to the antebellum South and to
the colonial sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean. One village Tan-Tan stumbles
across later in her escapades as the Robber Queen operates on a plantation system.
She quickly runs the other direction after encountering a woman chained in the
cane fields.
62 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 36.
63 Gregory E. Rutledge and Nalo Hopkinson, “Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with
Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson,” African American Review 33, no. 4 (1999):
599.
Chapter 4. The Cruel Optimism of the Asian Century

1 Lori Wallach, “nafta on Steroids,” The Nation, June 27, 2012, https://www.the
nation.com/article/nafta-steroids/.
2 Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistable Shift of Global Power
to the East (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008).
3 See Jini Kim Watson, The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and
Urban Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). See also and World-
ing Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Eds. Ananya Roy and Aihwa
Ong (2011), in which Ong quotes Rem Koolhaas’ 2004 statement: “. . . the skyline
rises in the East.”
4 Alan Greenspan, “Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan” (presentation, Annual
Dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture of The American Enterprise Institute for Public
Policy Research, Washington, DC, December 5, 1996. https://www.federalreserve
.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1996/19961205.htm.
5 Greenspan, “Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan.”
6 It is particularly important to remember Japan’s occupation of Singapore (1942–45),
which marks Singapore not only as a former British colony but also as a city-state
with multiple imperialisms in its history. As this chapter is especially interested in
the relationship between a Singaporean text relationship and techno-Orientalism,
which is most conventionally associated with Japan, we must consider the postcolo-
nial context of Singapore as we witness neoliberal ideology and policy taking shape
in that context.
7 Asian Development Bank, Asia 2050: Realizing the Asian Century (Singapore: Asian
Development Bank, 2011), 1; accessed December 9, 2016, https://www.adb.org/pub
lications/asia-2050-realizing-asian-century. Headquartered in the Philippines, the
adb has a Japanese president. Of its 67 members, Japan and the United States have
19 0 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 3
the most investments in the bank—15.6 percent each. There should be no mistaking
that the bank’s push for regional cooperation means the continued neoliberalization
of postsocialist and postindependence economies.
8 Peter Drysdale, “Coming to Terms with the Asian Century,” East Asia Forum, June
10, 2013, accessed July 31, 2016, http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2013/06/10/coming
-to-terms-with-the-asian-century/.
9 Rajat M. Nag, “The Asian Century: Plausible but not Preordained” (speech, School
of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic
of China, June 20, 2011).
10 “About adb: Members,” Asian Development Bank, accessed December 10, 2016,
https://www.adb.org/about/members.
11 See David Palumbo-Liu’s productive formulation of Asian/American that “marks
both the distinction installed between ‘Asian’ and ‘American’ and a dynamic, un-
settled, and inclusive movement” (Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial
Frontier [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999], 1).
12 “Key Facts,” Asian Development Bank, last accessed December 10, 2016, https://www
.adb.org/about/key-facts.
13 Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 16.
14 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999).
15 In this discussion, the special issue of American Quarterly on “Race, Empire, and
the Crisis of the Subprime” (64, no. 3 [2012]), coedited by Paula Chakravartty and
Denise Ferreira da Silva, has been helpful.
16 See Jane Chi Hyun Park, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and
Greta A. Niu, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and
Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
17 David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism,” Spaces of Identity: Global
Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995), 153.
18 Morley and Robins, “Techno-Orientalism,” 170.
19 Morley and Robins, “Techno-Orientalism,” 153.
20 Philips Norelco launched an ad campaign to promote their moisturizing wet-
shave system produced in collaboration with Nivea for Men http://youtu.be/dAu
vyqvN3Uo.
21 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s formulation of “friction” as an integral component of
movement (what makes a wheel turn when it encounters a road) is instructive here.
Friction, writes Tsing, “refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled ma-
chine” and asks us to think about universals “not as truths or lies but as stick en-
gagements” (Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection [Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005], 6).
22 See the Philips Company Profile online, accessed July 2017, http://www.philips.com
/a-w/about/company/introduction.html.
23 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun offers a thorough analysis of how this juxtaposition of
primitive artifacts and exoticizing futurisms facilitates a “high-tech Orientalism”
that renders digital landscapes available for conquest by styling the future as Ori-
entalized empty space: “These anachronistic signs of Japaneseness are not chosen
randomly. Rather, samurais, ninjas, and shonen are drawn from Japan’s Edo period
and they confine the Japanese past to the period of first contact between the West
and Japan. Cyberpunk thus mixes images of the mysterious yet-to-be-opened Japan
(which eventually did submit to the West) with the conquering corporate Japan of
the future” (“Orienting Orientalism: How to Map Cyberspace,” in AsianAmerica.Net:
Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, edited by Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia
Wong [New York: Routledge, 2003], 12). Kumiko Sato writes that “images of Japan
manifest in two contrary stereotypes, which are the premodern traditionalism (gei-
sha, samurai, etc.) and the supremacy of high-technology” (355n1).
24 Laura Kang, “The Uses of Asianization: Figuring Crises, 1997–98 and 2007–?”
“Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime,” edited by Paula Chakravartty and
Denise da Silva, special issue, American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 411–36.
25 Kang, “Uses of Asianization,” 413.
26 Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First among Equals
(1989), translated by Frank Baldwin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
27 “Building Blocks for New Businesses: Trust,” Future•Ready Singapore, Singapore
Economic Development Board, last updated December 14, 2016, http://www.edb
.gov.sg/content/edb/en/why-singapore/about-singapore/values/trust.html.
28 Future•Singapore: The Future in Singapore, and Singapore in the Future, Singapore Eco-
nomic Development Board, 3; accessed July 2017, https://www.edb.gov.sg/content
/dam/edb/en/resources/pdfs/publications/Annual%20Reports/AnnualReport-2007
–2008.pdf.
29 “Building Blocks,” Singapore Economic Development Board.
30 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1991, translated by Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10–12, 28–43.
31 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 181.
32 National Population and Talent Division, “A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic
Singapore,” Prime Minister’s Office, January 2013, accessed January 8, 2017. “Up-
grading” and “upskilling” are iconic neoliberal concepts, the counterpoints to the
mobility of global elites who exercise what Ong has called “flexible citizenship”
(Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999]).
33 Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 20.
34 Sonny Liew, “Character and Story Synopsis Cards,” in Box of Things: Mementoes from
a Dusty City, limited edition box set.
35 Liew, “Character and Story Synopsis Cards,” in Box of Things.
36 This and future references to Sonny Liew, Malinky Robot: Collected Stories and Other
Bits (New York: Image Comics, 2011) are made parenthetically.
37 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 185.
19 2 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 4
38 Liew learned about San’ya from Edward Fowler’s San’ya Blues (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1996), which he found in a bargain book bin at Brown University’s
bookstore. Fowler’s ethnography of day laborers in Tokyo offers an alternative nar-
rative to the history of the Japanese economic boom from 1989 to 1991.
39 Sonny Liew, Box of Things: Mementoes from a Dusty City. Press Kit for Malinky Robot.
Printed and distributed by Sonny Liew, 2012. In the box, Liew includes a small car-
ton containing trading cards for each character of Malinky Robot. “Eke out a life” is
a phrase Liew uses to describe Atari on his character card.
40 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 150–51.
41 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 146.
42 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
10. Hacking’s argument points to the regulation of populations through laws of
chance. This statistical turn took root in the idea “that one can improve—control—
a deviant subpopulation by enumeration and classification” (3).
43 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, translated
by Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 92.
44 Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011),
164.
45 “Company History: 1946,” Highlights, last accessed February 18, 2016, https://www
.highlights.com/about-us/history. “Fun with a Purpose” has been the Highlights slo-
gan since its inception in 1946.
46 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 3.
47 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 185–86.
48 Shibani Mahtani, “Thursday’s the Day to Go All the Way for Civic Duty in Singa-
pore: New Ad Campaign Urges Locals to Help Spike Birthrate; ‘Make Fireworks
Ignite,’” The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2012.
49 Thanks to Catherine Fung for calling my attention to the Mentos National Night
(“Mentos National Night,” August 1, 2012, accessed August 1, 2016, https://youtube
/8jxU89x78ac) and National Day Proposal ads (“Mentos National Day Proposal,”
July 31, 2013, accessed August 1, 2016, http://youtu.be/xvKLcQKoETU).
50 Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2002), 160.
51 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 3.
52 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 63.
53 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4–5. Berlant’s formulation of the impasse is more fully
developed in chapter 6 of Cruel Optimism. My use of the word here is perhaps best
glossed by Berlant in her introduction, in which she describes an “impasse shaped
by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly
proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on” (16).
54 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 9, 256.
55 Lauren Berlant, “On Her Book Cruel Optimism.” Cover Interview. Rorotoko.com.
June 5, 2012. http://rorotoko.com/interview/20120605_berlant_lauren_on_cruel
_optimism/.
Chapter 5. Salt Fish Futures

1 Joseph Masco, Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New
Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 304–5.
2 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations,” in
Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey
and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 238.
3 DeLoughrey, “Heliotropes,” 238.
4 Hal M. Friedman, Governing the American Lake: The US Defense and Administration of
the Pacific, 1945–1947 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007). Fried-
man provides a history of the ttpi, wherein American policy makers, planners, and
strategic thinkers were “concerned enough about the United States’ future position
in the Pacific Basin to be willing to weaken the United States’ commitment to UN
principles and argue for predominant US control in the area, whether by strategic
trusteeship or annexation” (210).
5 Kimie Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Fran-
cisco System (New York: Routledge, 2007).
6 Hal M. Friedman, “The Beast in Paradise: The United States Navy in Micronesia,
1943–1947,” Pacific Historical Review, 52, no. 2 (1993): 173.
7 Friedman, “The Beast in Paradise,” 177.
8 This and future references to Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl: A Novel (Toronto, ON: Dun-
durn, 2002) are made parenthetically.
9 I borrow from Sarah Franklin and Elizabeth Freeman, respectively, and will develop
them later in the chapter.
10 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 5;
Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,”
in “Queer Inhumanisms,” special issue, edited by Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen,
glq 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 182–207.
11 By titling this chapter, “Specters of the Pacific,” I am riffing off of Ian Baucom’s
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Baucom himself is quoting Toni Morrison
in the phrase “specters of the Atlantic” and mobilizes this haunting to recognize not
only the disposability but also the insurability of slaves thrown overboard from the
1781 British slave ship Zong as an early instantiation of the financialization of bio-
matter. I understand the atomic devastations in the Pacific theater of war in the mid-
twentieth century as a significant turning point that set up the financial apparatus
that would help fund the age of genomic sequencing and genetic engineering.
12 Larissa Lai, “Future Asians: Migrant Speculations, Repressed History & Cyborg
Hope,” West Coast Line 38, no. 2 (2004): 168–75.
13 Laura Kang, “The Uses of Asianization: Figuring Crises, 1997–98 and 2007–?,” in
“Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime,” edited by Paula Chakravartty and
19 4 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 5
Denise da Silva, special issue of American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 412, 413. Kang’s
critical attention to the racialization of these financial narratives is key. For an ex-
ample of the Asianization of crises, see Christopher Wood, The Bubble Economy:
Japan’s Extraordinary Speculative Boom of the ’80s and the Dramatic Bust of the ’90s
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992). Wood’s characterization of Japan’s specu-
lative “frenzy” (6) in the late 1980s that led to the Tokyo stock market crash of 1990
anticipates Alan Greenspan’s description of the speculative bubble in Japan as a case
of “irrational exuberance” in 1996.
14 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 214. “Context,” writes Haraway, “is a fundamental matter
not as surrounding ‘information’, but as co-structure or co-text.”
15 See the work of Paula E. Stephan, especially How Economics Shapes Science (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). The tension between basic science
and entrepreneurial science as it relates to genomics in particular was the topic of
a 2001 special issue of Nature on the hgp. The introduction to that issue considered
the burgeoning commercial sector based on publication of genome information
(Paula E. Stephan, “Human Genomes: Public and Private,” in special issue, Nature
409, no. 6822 [2001]: 745).
16 Colin Milburn, “Modifiable Futures: Science Fiction at the Bench,” Isis 101, no. 3
(2010): 568.
17 Bruce Sterling defines “slipstream” as a genre related to speculative fiction, fantasy,
and literary fiction, in which books “tend to sarcastically tear at the structure of
‘everyday life.’ . . . Slipstream tends, not to ‘create’ new worlds, but to *quote* them,
chop them up out of context, and turn them against themselves” (“catscan 5: Slip-
stream,” sf Eye 5 [July 1989], 4). See also Bruce Sterling, “Slipstream 2,” Science Fic-
tion Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 6–10.
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 185. Gordon’s psychoanalytic approach to
“ghostly matters” makes for a productive frame through which to read Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in the history of the hgp.
19 “Fistula,” MedlinePlus, A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia, U.S. National Library of
Medicine, page last updated: November 1, 2016, https://medlineplus.gov/ency
/article/002365.htm.
20 Thanks to Rebekah Sheldon for pointing out this connection. Sims’s controversial
practices are documented in Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid (New York: An-
chor, 2007).
21 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”
Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 80. In Spillers’s conclusion, she writes that out of the
context of slavery, “only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-
dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the tradi-
tional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different
social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered
femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually
claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’), which her cul-
ture imposes in blindness, ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text
for a female empowerment” (80).
22 Washington, Medical Apartheid, 69.
23 Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and
Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” in “Race, Empire,
and the Crisis of the Subprime,” edited by Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira
da Silva, special issue, American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 369.
24 Thanks to Tamara Ho for reminding me of this crucial detail and for offering her
own insightful reading of Salt Fish Girl in “Larissa Lai’s ‘New Cultural Politics of Inti-
macy’: Animal. Asian. Cyborg,” in “Speculative Life,” special issue, Social Text: Peri-
scope (2012).
25 I would like to thank Yoo Jung Kim for her excellent undergraduate research paper
on this topic for my class, “Science, Fiction, and Empire,” Spring 2014.
26 Robert Mullan Cook-Deegan, “The Alta Summit, December 1984,” Genomics, 5, no. 3
(1989): 661.
27 Cook-Deegan, “The Alta Summit,” 661.
30 National Human Genome Research Institute, “All About the Human Genome Proj
ect (HGP),” accessed June 24, 2014, http://www.genome.gov/10001772.
32 Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 117.
33 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyberspace,”
paper presented at the Matters of Representation: Feminism, Theory and the Arts
Conference, University of Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, March–April 2000.
34 Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2009), 49.
35 See Stephan, “Human Genomes: Public and Private,” 745. Stephan’s work docu-
ments this shift in the years immediately following World War II. See also Sheila
Slaughter, “Beyond Basic Science: Research University Presidents’ Narratives of
Science Policy,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 18, no. 3 (1993), 278–302.
Slaughter argues that during this period, the relation of university science to govern-
ment and to industry also changed markedly, as part of an increasingly ubiquitous
model of “academic capitalism” (278).
36 Milburn, “Modifiable Futures,” 568.
37 Eric D. Green and Mark S. Guyer, “Charting a Course for Genomic Medicine from
Base Pairs to Bedside,” Nature 470, no. 7333 (2011): 204.
38 Green and Guyer, “Charting a Course for Genomic Medicine,” 207.
42 Susan Merrill Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedi-
cine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 234.
19 6 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 5
43 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 131.
44 Paula E. Stephan and Sharon G. Levin, “Property Rights and Entrepreneurship in
Science,” Small Business Economics 8 (1996): 181.
45 Cooper, Life as Surplus, 130.
47 Cooper, Life as Surplus, 141. See also Kaushik Sunder Rajan, ed., Lively Capital: Bio-
technologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2012). In his introduction to that edited volume, Sunder Rajan highlights
“the convergence of the life sciences with systems and regimes of capital. In that
register, the title [of the volume] refers concretely to the ways in which the life sci-
ences are increasingly incorporated into market regimes. This is an institutional
movement, away from the university and toward the market, which has been par-
ticularly marked in the American context since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and
has, in the process, seen the university itself become a more entrepreneurial insti-
tutional space, one that explicitly encourages the commercialization of ‘basic’ re-
search conducted within its confines” (2). Whereas Sunder Rajan elucidates the
commercialization of university research and the collusion between market and
university, Cooper focuses even more intently on the “tight institutional alliances
between the arts of speculative promise and risk-taking and the actual cultures of
life science experimentation” (Life as Surplus, 142).
48 Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge,
MA: mit Press, 2005), 138.
49 Judith Roof, The Poetics of dna (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007),
28. See also Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the
Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
50 Roof, The Poetics of dna, 3.
51 Green and Guyer, “Charting a Course for Genomic Medicine from Base Pairs to
Bedside,” 204.
52 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–
1976, translated by David Macey, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana
(New York: Picador, 2003), 252.
53 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 253.
54 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 254.
55 Jasbir K. Puar, “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,”
glq 18:1 (2011): 153, 154.
56 MedLine Plus, “Genes and Gene Therapy,”
57 See, for example, Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of
Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2005), 79–116, 245–76.
58 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New
York: Routledge, 1993).
59 Roof, The Poetics of dna, 85.
60 Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007), 29–30. Franklin approaches the concept of genetic drag
through the iconic example of Dolly the cloned sheep, whose story was one of the
events that influenced Lai in the writing of Salt Fish Girl. Franklin situates the cir-
culation of Dolly’s story as a narrative and phenomenon within a history of cloning
that is oddly textured with insecurities about genealogical normativity. The clon-
ing technology that produced Dolly performed “genetic drag” insofar as it “enabled
adult dna to ‘pass’ as newly youthful.” Dolly, according to Franklin, reads as biologi-
cally queer and disruptive of the dividing line between animal and human.
61 Brian G. Dias and Kerry J. Ressler, “Parental Olfactory Experience Influences Behav-
ior and Neural Structure in Subsequent Generations,” Nature Neuroscience 17, no. 1
(2014): 89–96.
62 Dan Hurley, “Grandma’s Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes,” Discover, May
2013, accessed June 20, 2014, http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas
-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes.
63 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC:
64 Freeman, Time Binds, 65.
65 Karen Michelle Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of
Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida
Today 3, no. 2 (2010): 241. Like Lai, Barad uses the atomic bomb as a site of explod-
ing preconceived formulations of human experience.
66 Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance,” 241.
67 L. Lai, “Future Asians,” 171.
68 L. Lai, “Future Asians,” 174.
69 L. Lai, “Future Asians,” 173, 174.
70 Asian Development Bank, “Key Facts,” accessed June 14, 2014, www.adb.org/about
/key-facts.
71 This textual example also speaks to the broader phenomenon of gamification that
has long tethered the video-game industry to military training and Wall Street
speculations. See Hayles-Jagoda-LeMieux, “Speculation: Financial Games.”
72 Paul Lai reads the novel’s theme of smelliness (recall that one of the indicators of
dreaming sickness is a pungent odor) as the text’s critique of punishing difference,
especially nonnormative reproduction. He argues that “the novel’s focus on stinky
bodies emphasizes the materiality and biology that undergird social relations even
as biotechnological control promises a transcendence of the biological” (“Stinky
Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl,”
in “Alien/Asian,” edited by Stephen Sohn, special issue, melus 33, no. 4 [2008]: 167).
73 David Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diaspora,” Social Text 21, no. 3
(2003): 4.
74 Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diaspora,” 6–7. In a close reading of a
commercial for mutual funds, annuities, and life insurance, Eng demonstrates that
the invention of the nuclear family supplants a social commons and coerces invest-
ments in privatized futures instead.
19 8 - N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 5
75 Jackie Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), 131.
76 Quoted in Puar, “Ecologies of Sex, Sensation, and Slow Death,” Social Text, 18.
November 22, 2010. http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/ecologies_of_sex
_sensation_and_slow_death/.
78 Chris Kelly, dir. “Supermarket Slave Trail,” Chris Kelly Film, http://chriskellyfilm
.com/film/journalism/supermarket-slave-trail/, accessed February 22, 2017; also
available on The Guardian’s YouTube Channel: The Guardian, “Slave Ships & Super-
markets: Modern Day Slavery in Thailand | Guardian Investigations,” YouTube, June
11, 2014, https://youtu.be/PB9gTbLGTN4, accessed February 22, 2017. See also:
Kate Hodal, Chris Kelly, and Felicity Lawrence, “Revealed: Asian Slave Labour Pro-
ducing Prawns for Supermarkets in US, UK,” The Guardian, June 10, 2014, https://
www.theguardian.com/global- development/2014/jun/10/supermarket-prawns
-thailand-produced-slave-labour, accessed February 22, 2017.
79 Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC:
Epilogue
1 Samuel R. Delany, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 13.
2 Delany, Shorter Views, 11.
3 Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl: A Novel (Toronto, ON: Dundurn, 2002), 259.
N O T E S T O E P I L O G U E - 199
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216 - BIBLIOGRAPHY
I n d ex
Abu Ghraib, 92, 94 assisted reproductive technologies (art), 81,

Agamben, Giorgio, 6 87–89, 103, 160
Agent Orange, 57, 69, 184n43 Association of Southeast Asian Nations
Akanksha Infertility Clinic, 80, 86 (asean), 122–23
Alexander, M. Jacqui: on the criminalization of Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, 155
queer sex, 113 Austin, J. L., 158
alien: abduction as trope, 54, 161; and the
border, 57, 62, 67, 70–71; currency, 1; flora
Balsamo, Anne: on reproductive technologies
and fauna in the Amazon, 26; “illegal alien
and discipline, 89
orange scare,” 59; Japanese “as unfeeling
Barad, Karen, 35, 65, 161
aliens,” 125; migrants as, 67; “Octomom” as,
Battlestar Galactica, 53
87–89; in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,
Baudrillard, Jean: on emergency simulation,
30–32, 35, 37, 49
53; Simulacra and Simulation, 182n9
Alta Summit, 154, 156, 159
Bear, Greg. See sigma
Amazon: as speculative space, 30, 33, 36, 38,
Beaumont, Matthew: on science fiction’s use
45, 49. See rainforest
of the anamorphic image, 187n25
Amazons, 26
Bell, Derrick: “The Space Traders,” 54, 113
anamorphosis, 93–95, 99
benevolence, guise of, 28, 37, 39, 42–45, 113
Anansi (trickster spider), 108
Benford, Gregory: on “hard” science fiction, 14
Andrews, Arlan. See sigma
Benjamin, Walter: and the “Angel of History,”
Anzaldúa, Gloria: on frontiers and borders, 21
17, 176n61; “homogeneous empty time,”
Arau, Sergio. See Day without a Mexican, A
19, 39
Area 51, 77–78
Bergson, Henri: on duration, 33
Arizmendi, Yareli. See Day without a Mexi-
Berlant, Lauren: “cruel optimism,” 22, 143,
can, A
145, 169–70; notion of the impasse, 19
Ashitey, Claire Hope, 91, 100
Bikini Atoll, 147, 160, 167
Asian Century, 119–25, 166
biopolitics: 80, 90
Asian Development Bank (adb), 5, 122–24,
Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy), 107
162, 190n7
Black Lives Matter, 100–102
Asian Development Fund, 124
Black Star Line, 107
Asian migration to Latin America, 67–68
Blade Runner (Scott), 125
Bloch, Ernst, 6 Chang, Jason Oliver, 67
Bogues, Anthony: on the human, 97 Chang, Konrad, 67
borderlands, narratives of futurity at the U.S.- Chesnutt, Charles, 114
Mexico, 54; and the notions of homeland Children of Men (Cuarón), 21, 81–84, 88–100,
and nation, 65; “nuclear” (Masco), 77–78; 117–18
remapping of the, 60–61, 67, 70, 184n36; in Chilean “grape scare” of 1989, 58–60
Tropic of Orange, 55. See also borders Chin, Vincent: murder of, 49–50
borders, 21; border wall, 62; flexibility of, 55, Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 67
57, 60, 63, 66, 70; Internal Security Act Chuh, Kandice: on citizenship, 18
of 1950 (a.k.a., the McCarran Act), 78; citizenship, 88, 129; flexible, 124, 129; global
“nuclear borderlands” (Masco), 77; Secure (financial), 8; and justice (Chuh), 18; and
Border Initiative (G. W. Bush), 61; as test- “Octomom,” 90; and race, 84; statistical
ing ground for surveillance and military (Currah and Stryker), 6
technologies, 54, 57–58; Tropic of Cancer clone: Dolly the sheep, 150, 197n57; and the
as border, 65 subaltern, 146, 160
Borders Trilogy (Rivera), 71 cognitive estrangement (Suvin), 13
British Rubber Restoration Act (a.k.a., the collaboration: cross-ethnic (in Tropic of
Stevenson Plan), 38, 180n28 Orange), 55; in Midnight Robber, 105; of
Buck v. Bell (1927 Supreme Court case), 86. See sigma and the Department of Homeland
also eugenics; sterilization campaigns Security, 51–53; transnational (in Sleep
Bush, George H. W.: and the U.S. invasion of Dealer), 74
Panama, 59 colonization: of the future, 11–12, 73; of South-
Bush, George W.: Secure Border Initiative, 62; east Asia, 44; temporal, 28
War on Terror, 72, 78 compound interest, 7
Butler, Judith: on drag, 160 Cook-Deegan, Robert: on the connection be-
Butler, Octavia, 9, 104–5 tween the hgp and atomic bomb effects,
154–55
Cooper, Melinda, 157, 166
Camacho, Julia, 67
creolization: as survival technique in Midnight
Capitalocene, 22
Robber, 109
cartography: counter-cartography, 49; im-
Crick, Francis. See Watson, James and Francis
perialist, 11, 65–66; revisionist (Yamashita),
Crick
61, 70; utopian, 184n36. See also maps
crisis: everyday (in Malinky Robot), 143; simu-
Celebration, FL (Disney-planned town), 150,
lation, 53
166
Cuarón, Alfonso: Children of Men, 91–100,
Census Bureau: and the “imperative to be
117–18; Y Tu Mamá También, 92–93
counted,” 6
Currah, Paisley, 6
Chakrabarty, Dipesh: on “the waiting room of
cyborg: Japanese as, 125; labor, 71; manifesto
history,” 5–7, 130
(Haraway), 15
Chakravartty, Paula and Denise Ferreira da
cybracero, 71, 74
Silva: on the “racial logic of global financial
capitalism,” 153
chance: staying open to, 170; the “taming of,” Dark Winter (2001 smallpox attack simula-
11, 133 tion), 52–53
218 - INDEX
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. See Chakravartty, Ebbet, Charles Clyde: Lunch atop a Skyscraper,
Paula and Denise Ferreira da Silva 138, 141
da Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula, 3 econometrics, 4, 149
datafication, 4, 158, 170 economies of exchange, alternative: in Malinky
Davis, Angela, 102–3 Robot, 135
Davis, Dana Ain: on “Octomom” Nadya Sule- Edelman, Lee: on “reproductive futurism,”
man, 87–88 98, 142
Day of Absence (Ward), 54 Electronic Disturbance Theater, 55
Day without a Mexican, A (Arau and Ariz- emergency: coalitions in times of, 83; deten-
mendi), 54, 113 tion clauses, 78; discourses of, 78; film-
“Day without Immigrants, A,” 54 making (Arizmendi), 54; simulations of,
dead capital (de Soto), 46 52–53
de Certeau, Michel, 75–76, 135 “empire-building corporation” (Ford), 48
Delany, Samuel, 9, 15–17, 19, 104, 167, 168– Eng, David: on queer diaspora, 164
69 Esch, Elizabeth, 42–43
Deng Xioping, 123 eugenics, 42–43, 50, 86–88, 100, 102, 159
derivatives, 1–5, 12, 16, 78, 156 Everett, Anna, 104, 115
Derrida, Jacques, 16, 172n2 exception, conditions of, 72
Dery, Mark, 104 exceptionalism: via difference, 31–32; U.S.,
de Soto, Hernando: on “dead capital,” 46 54, 77
diasporic movement, 17, 106–7, 111; “queer extrapolation, 166, 170; Cuarón’s (re: Chil-
diaspora” (Eng), 164 dren of Men), 94; economic, 2–4, 151, 157;
difference: as asset, 31–32; as marking “how through excavation, 27–28, 30–37, 45
ancient the alphabet of our bodies” (Lai), exuberance: irrational, 120, 141–42, 169–70,
167; punishing (in Salt Fish Girl), 198n72; 194n13; queer, 145
racial, 42; spotting the, 141
disaster: capitalism, 51, 78, 157; fiction of, 52
fantasy: colonial fantasy of mastery over
discourse: speculation as, 168–70
the technology of looking (Mercer), 98;
dividual (Deleuze), 149
of deliverance from a subsistence econ-
Dolly the sheep, 150, 197n57. See also clone
omy through becoming a hacker, 183n18;
double consciousness, 110
of flight, 135; in Ford’s ventures in Brazil,
Douglass, Frederick, 107, 114
26, 39, 45; genre of, 13, 28, 104; imperial-
Downes v. Bidwell (1901 Supreme Court case),
ist fantasies of the tropics, 29–30, 34, 48;
56, 58
neoliberal fantasy of a seamless world uni-
drag: as example of gender performativity
fied under the sign of global capitalism,
(Butler), 160; genetic (Franklin), 149, 159,
8; racialized fantasies of a neocolonialist
160, 167, 197n57; temporal (Freeman),
capitalism, 181n36; of rendering laborers
160–61, 167
docile, 44; of risk and terror at the border,
Drysdale, Peter: on the Asian Century, 122–23
76–77; U.S. and European fantasies of Japan
Du Bois, W. E. B., 9, 107; use of the “veil” con-
in techno-Orientalism, 124, 126–27; West-
cept, 110
ern fantasy of Asia as supplementary and
Dunmire, Patricia: on preemption and policy,
disposable, 128
52–53
feminist science studies, 2, 35, 65, 84
I N D E X - 219
Ferreira Furtado, Júnia: “tropical empiricism,” futurism: Afro, Asian, and Chican@, 10; repro-
33–34 ductive, 98, 116, 118, 142
fictitious capital (Marx), 2, 49 futurity, 2–23, 15, 19; Asian, 120–27, 143, 145,
finance: as “capitalism’s imagination” 167; genomic, 150–51, 158, 160; in Midnight
(Haiven), 4 Robber, 81–82, 106, 112, 116; neoliberal,
Findlay, David, 109 149; policy from ideological, 52–53; poli-
Fisher, Mark, 13, 16–17 tics of (in Sleep Dealer), 73; profit-driven,
fish radio-autograph, 146 27; queer, 6, 169, 106; reproductive, 81, 87,
Fitzcarraldo (Herzog), 25, 29, 178n1 88–89, 99, 116, 138, 141–42; Singaporean,
flexible: accumulation, 57, 145; borders, 57, 130, 133, 142; transpacific, 164, 166–67
70; citizenship, 20, 124, 129; construction
of Singaporeans, 130; future, 13, 62; status
Gandhi, Rajiv, 123
of “foreign” vs. “domestic,” 56; system of
Garner, Margaret, 102–3
speculative capital as, 12; temporalities, 19
Garvey, Marcus: Black Star Line, 106–7
Food and Drug Administration, 5
Gates, Bill, 108
Ford, Henry. See Fordlándia
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 104, 109, 115
Fordlándia, 20, 26–29, 38–49
Gauguin, Paul: and Tahiti, 31, 179n15
foreign: feigned foreignness (in Children of
gaze: anamorphic, 93–94; cinematic, 76,
Men), 95; foreign vs. domestic, 32, 56–57;
93–94, 99; colonial, 31, 178n1; policing, 76
students/professionals in Singapore, 129
gene therapy, 150, 159–60
forgetting: “culture of amnesia” in the U.S.
genetic mutation, 148, 150, 153, 159; vs. modi-
(Sturken), 28; imperialist practices of, 49,
fication, 151, 160; vs. regeneration, 151, 154,
70; selective (of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by
156, 158–59
nhgri), 155. See also memory
Gibson, William, 108, 124
Foucault, Michel: on biopower, 158–59; on
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson: on racism, 84
discourse, 168–69; on heredity, 158; and
Gilroy, Paul: image of the ship in The Black
“the population,” 103
Atlantic, 107; survival via alternative tech-
Franklin, Sarah: on “genetic drag,” 159–60,
nologies, 115
197n57
Glave, Diane, 107–8
Freeman, Elizabeth: on temporal “drag” as a
Global North/South, 5, 42, 46, 50, 62, 72, 80,
productive obstacle, 161; temporally regu-
82, 84, 99–100, 102, 111
lated laboring bodies, 19
god: “the god trick” (Haraway), 2, 15; “voyeur-
Fregoso, Rosa Linda: on Lone Star (Sayles),
god” perspective (de Certeau), 75–76
187n32
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 64, 184n36
Freyre, Gilberto: on “racial democracy” in Bra-
good life, 138, 141, 143, 145
zil, 42–43
Gordon, Avery: on haunted texts, 37–38, 82;
future: colonization of, 5, 11–12, 73, 169; as
“memory as haunting,” 152; “repetition-as-
contested terrain, 143; “creative sabotage
displacement,” 156
of” (Cooper), 166; Future•Singapore ini-
Grandin, Greg, 27, 181n36
tiative, 127–30, 133; in the present, 7; as
Granny Nanny of the Maroons, 108
“queerness’s domain” (Muñoz), 6; and
“grape scare.” See Chilean “grape scare” of
scientific research, 148–51; as speculative
1989
space, 53; writing bodies into, 149, 167, 169
Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 147
Future•Singapore initiative, 127–30
220 - INDEX
Greenspan, Alan, 120, 122, 169 idleness: forms of (in Malinky Robot), 133
griot tradition: in Hopkinson’s Midnight Rob- imperialism: of British and Dutch in Asia,
ber, 110 39, 123–24; neoliberalism as a particularly
Greenfield Village (historic theme park), 48 American form of capitalist, 127; tempo-
Guantánamo Bay, 78, 94–95 ral and gustatory, 39; by the United Fruit
Company, 61; U.S. “imperialism-without-
colonies” (McClintock), 174n36; of U.S. in
Hacker, Marilyn, 16
Asia, 123–24, 147–48, 166; of U.S. in Brazil,
Hacking, Ian, 11
38–39; of U.S. in Puerto Rico, 56
Haiven, Max: on capitalism, 4
industrialized farming, 96
Halberstam, Jack: on queer subcultures, 18–19
Internal Security Act of 1950 (a.k.a., the
Haraway, Donna, 15, 35; “virtual speculum,” 97
McCarran Act), 78
Harvey, David, 11
International Monetary Fund (imf), 122, 127
hauntology, 172n2; in Children of Men, 92–95,
invisible labor, 81, 120, 124: and the “Super-
99; in Guantánamo, 95; haunted future,
market Slave Trail,” 166–67; supporting
120; haunted Pacific, 147; haunted texts, 37;
scientific enterprises, 19–20; in transna-
haunting as analytic device through which
tional surrogacy, 79–87; in Tropic of Orange,
to read science fiction, 186n19; haunting
69
Pacific, 167; haunting as “transformative
“irrational exuberance,” 120, 141–42, 169–70,
recognition” (Gordon), 89; necropolitical,
194n13
88; and quantum entanglements, 65, 161; in
Salt Fish Girl, 150, 152
Heidegger, Martin, 6 James, C. L. R., 7
Herzog, Werner, 25, 29–30, 178n1 James, P. D., 21, 82
Highlights (magazine), 141 Jameson, Fredric: on perpetual renovation,
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 146–48, 160; and 171n4; on “spectrality,” 94
genomics, 153–55, 167. See also Manhattan Japanese-Brazilian immigration, 36–37
Project
Hochschild, Arlie, 80
Kang, Laura: and the “Asianization” of finan-
homeland security, 21, 77; Department of
cial crises, 127
Homeland Security, 51–53, 71, 78
Kaplan, Amy: on the foreign vs. the domestic,
hope: in Children of Men, 91–92, 97–99; over
56–58, 95
experience, 169; and home in Singapore,
Kim, Jodi: on wartime targets as objects of
129; in LaRue’s “Living Conditions in the
state knowledge, 155
Amazon Valley,” 42; in Malinky Robot, 133,
King, Rodney, 61
135; in Midnight Robber, 118. See also Ashi-
Klein, Naomi, 51, 78, 100
tey, Claire Hope; optimism
Knight, Frank: on uncertainty, 5, 173n17
Hopkinson, Nalo: Midnight Robber, 82–84,
Koepnick, Lutz P.: on the colonial gaze in
89–91, 104–18; on “postcolonial speculative
Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, 178n1
fiction” 9
Kuczynski, Alex, 79–81
Hu-Dehart, Evelyn, 67
Human Genome Project (hgp), 148–50,
153–60 La Condamine, Charles-Marie de, 26, 28–29,
HyperContexts: in Tropic of Orange, 66, 70 42
I N D E X - 221
Lai, Larissa: Salt Fish Girl, 148–54, 160–66, Martin, Randy: on risk management, 182n11
169 -maru (Japanese suffix: cycle or circle), 36
Lai, Paul: on smelliness in Salt Fish Girl, Marx, Karl: on predatory lending, 2; “repro-
198n72. See also smelliness ductive labor,” 80
Lakoff, Andrew: on “imaginative enactment,” McClintock, Anne: the “imperialism-without-
52 colonies” of the U.S., 174n36
LaRue, Carl, 26, 42–44, 48 Mehan, Uppinder, 9, 110
Latimer, Heather: on reproductive politics in memory: counter-memory, 104, 115; genetic,
Children of Men, 100 160; as haunting (Gordon), 152; in Salt Fish
Latour, Bruno: and the “dirty underbelly” of Girl, 152; in Sleep Dealer, 74–75; transgen-
the laboratory, 128 erational genetic, 160; Yamashita’s specula-
Lee, Benjamin. See LiPuma, Edward and tive fictions as technologies of, 28, 60, 68.
Benjamin Lee See also forgetting
Lee, Erika, 67 Mentos: and the 2012 effort to increase birth
Lee, Rachel, 34 rate in Singapore (National Night), 142
Lee Hsien Loong, 142 Mercer, Kobena, 98; on Mapplethorpe and the
Lefanu, Sarah: on “the plasticity of science fic- fetishizing of black skin, 188n35
tion,” 175n41 metaphor: and dna, 158; financial growth and
Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Tristes Tropiques, 31 gendered, agricultural, 128; “metaphorical
Liew, Sonny: Malinky Robot, 130–45 literacy” (Gates, Jr.), 104, and technology,
Lipsitz, George: on California’s Proposition 107
187, 59–60 Midnight Robber (Hopkinson), 81–84, 104–18
LiPuma, Edward and Benjamin Lee, 1, 3, 16 Milburn, Colin: on science and science fic-
Lloyd, David, 17, 27 tion, 151
Los Alamos, 77, 185n51 modernity, 10–11; Asian, 126; birth of, 97;
Los Angeles riots (1992), 56, 61 brought to the jungle, 26, 41, 44; “counter-
L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 112 culture of modernity” (Gilroy), 115; and
Lowe, Lisa, 17–18, 27, 125 racism, 19, 27; technoscientific, 29; and
Lubin, Alex: on “transcontinental crossroads,” temporality, 19, 39
77 Monsanto, 150, 167
Luciano, Dana: “chronobiopolitics,” 19; “queer Morley, David and Kevin Robins: on
inhumanisms” (Luciano and Chen), 149 techno-Orientalism, 124–25. See techno-
Ludwig, Daniel, 29 Orientalism
Morrison, Toni: Beloved (1987), 96–97, 102–3;
and Angela Davis, 103
Mahbubani, Kishore, 119–23
Mosley, Walter, 9, 104
Malinky Robot (Liew), 130–45
Muñoz, José: on the horizon of potentiality,
Manalansan, Martin: on “queer love,” 112
6–7
Manhattan Project, 154–56
mutation: Department of Energy’s interest in
maps: fantastical, 11–12, 174n33; of North,
detecting, 154; rebranded as regeneration,
Central, and South America, 184n36
158–59; in Salt Fish Girl, 22, 151–53, 160,
maquiladora system, 35, 54, 58, 63, 71–72
163, 169; in Through the Arc of the Rain For-
Marez, Curtis: on drug traffic and state power,
est, 30–32, 36. See also genetic mutation
59
222 - INDEX
nafta, 56–57, 59–61, 71 (Berlant), 143, 170; about genomics’ poten-
Nagasaki. See Hiroshima and Nagasaki tial, 156, 166; in Malinky Robot, 133, 145; Sin-
National Day (Singapore), 130, 142. See also gapore as a place of, 22, 145. See also hope
National Night (Singapore) oranges: and the foreign/domestic relationship
National Human Genome Research Institute of Puerto Rico to the U.S., 56; history of,
(nhgri), 149, 154–57, 166 61–62; as migrant subject, 57, 61; in Tropic
National Night (Singapore), 142. See also of Orange, 56–57, 59–66, 69. See also Agent
Mentos Orange; Rauch, Molly; Simpson, O. J.
Nelson, Alondra, 104
neoliberalism: American, 124, 127; in Asia,
Pacific Ocean: and building on sand, 119; as
120, 122, 124–25, 128–30; and cartography,
occupied, 166–67; as testing ground, 147–48
184n36; in Children of Men, 90; “chrono-
Pacific Proving Ground, 148
biopolitics” of neoliberal futurity, 19; and
paraliterature, 15–16, 20, 169
its fantasies, 8–10; and “free” trade, 14, 28,
Peas, Donald: on the “fantasmatic representa-
55–57, 60, 62, 67, 71; in Malinky Robot, 132,
tion of a nuclear holocaust in the anterior
138, 145; neoliberal economic policy, 20–21;
future,” 155; and the “symbolic drama” of
neoliberal financialization, 4; neoliberal
the homeland, 55
pluralism, 18; and racial and colonial subju-
Penderecki, Krzysztof: “Threnody for the Vic-
gation (Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva),
tims of Hiroshima,” 92
153; in Salt Fish Girl, 164; in Sleep Dealer,
Philips Norelco, 125–28
71–72; and transnational circulations of
Planned Parenthood, 101–2
commodified bodies, 84
population regulation, 6
Nilsson, Lennart, 99
Pournelle, Jerry. See sigma
Niven, Larry. See sigma
Pratt, Mary Louise: on imperialist cartogra-
North American Free Trade Agreement. See
phers, 65; on La Condamine’s expedition re-
nafta
port, 26; and the “mapping of progress,” 11
notional figure, 1–2, 172n1
prisons, private, 3
not yet, the, 2, 5–7, 23
privacy: as most precious commodity (in Mid-
novela (Brazilian soap opera), 31
night Robber), 112
privatization, 7; of care, 88; of corporate inter-
Obayashi Global, 138 ests and military defense, 73; culture of, 59;
O’Brien, Patty: on Gauguin’s Tahiti, 179n15 of food, 163; of the future, 23; of genetic
Octomom. See Suleman, Nadya (“Octomom”) material, 164; in Sleep Dealer, 73; of social
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez): and reproduction, 164; and speculative fiction,
the banana, 62 20; of water, 75
Ong, Aihwa: on “flexible citizenship,” 124; on progress narratives, 10–11; Benjaminian, 17,
“technopreneurialism,” 129 39; of Henry Ford, 26, 28, 169; and the hgp,
Operation Blockade/Hold the Line (El Paso, 150; “Ordem e Progresso” (motto on Brazil’s
TX), 60 flag), 41; of racial discrimination, 105; of
Operation Gatekeeper (San Diego, CA), 60 technofutures, 112
Oppenheimer, Robert, 78 property: “portraits of property,” 11; transfor-
optimism: and the Asian century, 122; over and mation of genes into, 158; transformation of
against “better judgment,” 169–70; cruel land into, 46–47
I N D E X - 223
Proposition 187 (California, 1994), 54, 59–60 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina: on the fantasy
Proposition 209 (California, 1996), 60 of deliverance from a subsistence economy
pseudoscience, 34, 43 through becoming a hacker, 183n18; on
Puar, Jasbir, 169; on “regenerative produc- nafta’s “fictions of development,” 60; on
tivity,” 159–60 the oscillation between central and periph-
public health, 6, 82 eral, 93
Salt Fish Girl (Lai), 148–54, 160–66, 169
Sanchez, Rosaura and Beatrice Pita: Lunar Bra-
Rai, Amit: on an “ecology of sensations,” 165
ceros, 55
rainforest: agency of, 30, 45, 47; chaotic diver-
Sanger, Frederick, 154
sity of, 178n1; resilience of, 26; spectacu-
Sanger, Margaret, 101–2
larization of, 29; as speculative space, 33,
Sayles, John: Lone Star, 187n32
36. See also Amazon; Yamashita, Karen Tei
science, 10–11; entrepreneurial approach to,
Ramayana (epic poem), 110–11, 189n57
148–51, 155–56, 195n15, 197n47; feminist
Ramírez, Catherine: on enjoying science fic-
science studies, 2, 35, 65, 84; and imperial-
tion, 171n3
ist enterprises, 28; and invisible labor,
Rauch, Molly: on oranges, 61
19–20, 81; and myth, 78; and neocolo-
Reagan, Ronald: War on Drugs, 56
nial enterprises, 37; plasticity of (Lefanu),
reality television: in Sleep Dealer, 75–76. See
175n41; and racism, 43; regenerative medi-
also Trump, Donald
cal, 157–60; reproductive, 153; and science
rebellion: at Fordlándia, 39–40, 45
fiction, 10, 13–15, 77, 106, 118, 151, 169,
regeneration: genomic, 148, 150, 155, 157; in
186n19; and speculation, 8; and the war on
Salt Fish Girl, 151
drugs, 59; “word science” (signifying), 109.
reparative practices (Sedgwick), 132–35
See also pseudoscience; technoscience
return of the repressed: the alien invader as,
science fiction: and the anamorphic image,
37; “dreaming sickness” in Salt Fish Girl as
187n25; antipositivist, 12–17; capitalism’s
(Gordon), 152
reliance on fantastical representations of
risk, 5–6, 12–13: at the border, 53–55, 76; and
space and time as, 49; “discovery” of rub-
fruit, 59; the future parceled into portions
ber as, 26; hard, 14; in the national interest,
of, 77; and the hgp, 155–57; management,
51–53, 71, 73, 78; and “Octomom,” 81–89;
21, 78, 170, 182n11; society, 72
“overwhelming whiteness” of (Ramírez),
Rivera, Alex: Borders Trilogy, 71; Sleep Dealer,
171n3; and race, 9, 84, 104; and science, 10,
55, 71–77; Why Cybraceros?, 71
13–15, 77, 106, 118, 151, 169, 186n19; and the
Roach, Joseph: on surrogation, 85
trope of colonization, 189n48
Roberts, Dorothy: on the limits of reproduc-
Scott, Ridley. See Blade Runner (Scott)
tive liberty, 102–3
securitization: financial, 3–5, 21–22, 52–55,
Rofel, Lisa: on neoliberalism in China, 130
156; genetic, 87, 155, 157, 164; military, 78,
Roof, Judith: on textual metaphors and dna,
147–48, 156, 169; security state, 53, 72, 155;
158–59
in Simulacra and Simulation, 182n9; in Sleep
Rutledge, Gregory, 104
Dealer, 73, 77
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: reparative practices,
Sadowski-Smith, Claudia: on the Chinese Ex- 132
clusion Act of 1882, 67 Sensenbrenner Bill (California), 54
Salazar, Rubén, 69 sigma, 51–53, 71
224 - INDEX
signification: as survival technique, 109, 115 Sturtevant, Alfred, 154
signifying, 115 Subramaniam, Banu, 159
Simpson, O. J., 57, 61, 69 Suleman, Nadya (“Octomom”), 81–82, 88–90
Sims, J. Marion: experimentation on slave Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill (née Assisted Re-
women, 103, 153 productive Technologies Bill), 80
Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard), 182n9 surrogacy, transnational, 79–87
simulation: of birth in Children of Men, surrogation (Roach), 85
99–100; “scenario-based exercises,” 52–53; surveillance: by “citizen-detectives,” 72; medi-
Simulacra and Simulation (Beaudrillard), cal, 99; and the pregnant body, 82; sous-
182n9 veillance (surveillance from below), 61;
Singapore: reinvention of (Future•Singapore), state, 55, 94; technologies at the border,
127–30 53–54, 57, 60, 62–63, 71
skyscraper: as global sign for financial growth, survival literature, 26
119–21; Lunch atop a Skyscraper (Ebbets), Suvin, Darko: on science fiction, 13
141; in Malinky Robot, 133–35, 138, 140f
Sleep Dealer (Rivera), 55, 71–77
Tal, Kalí: on science fiction and black people,
slipstream, 151, 195n17
104
smelliness: in Malinky Robot, 133; in Salt Fish
Tate, Greg, 104
Girl, 152–53, 162, 198n72
Tavener, John, 97
sousveillance. See surveillance
Teatro Amazonas opera house, 29
“Space Traders, The” (Bell), 54, 113
technology: of biocapitalization, 83; border,
spectacle, 72, 76, 178n1; “consumer spectacles”
57, 71; in Children of Men, 90, 92, 96; of con-
(Ford), 41
trol, 113; diasporic movement as, 17, 107,
spectatorship, dynamics of, 77, 95
111; and the drug war, 59; of haunting, 93;
speculative fiction, 8–20; the Asian Century
liberation narrative of, 84; of looking, 98,
as, 122; La Condamine’s expedition report
187n30; of memory, 28, 60, 68; and meta-
as, 26; LaRue’s scouting report as, 44; as
phor/myth, 107–8; in Midnight Robber, 90,
narrative of futurity, 50; as survival tech-
106–9, 112, 115; of perspective, 97; of repro-
nique (in Midnight Robber), 109; as a tech-
duction, 81, 99; of rhetoric, 54; speculative
nology, 28, 70, 115
fiction as, 70; the state’s use of, 77, 94; of
Squier, Susan Merrill: on regenerative medi-
visibility, 69. See also assisted reproductive
cine, 157
technologies (art); techno-Orientalism;
Stepan, Nancy Leys: on scientific autonomy,
technoscience
15; on the tropicalist representations of the
techno-Orientalism, 124–27, 132–33, 145, 160
rainforest, 34, 179n19
technoscience, 11, 15, 19, 29, 41, 106, 108, 120,
sterilization campaigns: in the Global South,
126, 156
42; in Puerto Rico, 86; in the U.S., 43, 88,
Thomas, Sheree, 9, 104
90, 102
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Yamashita),
Sterling, Bruce: on “slipstream,” 195n17
27–37, 45–50
Stoler, Ann Laura, 27
time, 17–19; experiencing (reparative vs.
strategic trust, 147–48
paranoid modalities), 132–33; fantasies of
Stryker, Susan, 6
smooth, continuous, 126; at Fordlándia,
student loans: as financial speculation, 75
26, 39–41; in Midnight Robber, 113–16; “out
Sturken, Marita: “culture of amnesia,” 28
I N D E X - 225
time (continued) Vora, Kalindi: on transnational Indian surro-
of joint,” 1, 19, 172n2; in Salt Fish Girl, 149, gacy, 86
160–61, 167; travel, 28; wasted (in Malinky
Robot), 133
Walker, Sage. See sigma
traffic jam: in Tropic of Orange, 60, 63–64, 67
“Walking in the City” (de Certeau), 75–76, 135
Trans-Pacific Partnership, 120, 167
Ward, Douglas Turner: Day of Absence, 54
travel writing: and the mapping of progress, 11;
War of the Worlds (Welles), 52
as scientific knowledge production, 42
War on Drugs, 56, 59, 72
trickster tradition: in Midnight Robber, 108–9,
War on Terror, 72, 78
114–15
Watson, James and Francis Crick, 154, 158
Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 31
Welles, Orson: and the imaginative enactment
trolls, Internet, 100–101
of an emergency in War of the Worlds, 52
Tropic of Orange (Yamashita), 55–70
Why Cybraceros? (Rivera), 71
Trump, Donald, 3
Woodward, Kathleen: on rendering data into
trust territories: 147; Trust Territory of the
fiction or statistical narrative, 4
Pacific Islands (ttpi), 148
World Bank, 5, 122
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt: on friction as an in-
Wynter, Sylvia: on humanism, 98, 102
tegral component of movement, 191n21
Tubman, Harriet, 117
Tucker, Richard: on greed and leaf blight, 45, x-ray: at the border, 58, 71; in fish radio-
181n37 autographs, 146
Turner, Frederick Jackson: on frontiers and
borders, 21
Yamashita, Karen Tei: Through the Arc of the
Ty, Eleanor, 67
Rain Forest, 27–37, 45–50; Tropic of Orange,
55–70
Underground Railroad, 117
United Nations, 123, 147–48
Žižek, Slavoj: on Children of Men, 93, 100
utopia, 6–7, 125
226 - INDEX

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MIGRANT FUTURES

Duke University Press Durham and London 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Cover art: Sonny Liew, art from Malinky Robot.

Preface - ix Acknowledgments - xiii

1. I M P E R I A L R U B B E R The Speculative Arcs of

Notes - 171 Bibliography - 201 Index - 217

If speculation is a practice of world making, completing this book simi-

As of December 2014, approximately $710 trillion of the world’s capital

Toward an Antipositivist Science Fiction

Temporal Geographies of the Speculative Undercommons

I M P E R I A L R U B B E R The Speculative Arcs

I will outnumber you.

In Werner Herzog’s 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo, the eponymous protagonist

Extrapolation through Excavation:

“History is more or less bunk.”

I’ve got the future in my throat.

Migrant Oranges: The Fruits, Labors, and

Quarantine, Paranoia, and Militarization

The Orange and the Truck

Whose Future? Technologies of Reproduction

Cuarón’s film Children of Men depicts a near-­future dystopia in which

Race and the Visual Iconographies of Futurity

The Racialization of Reproductive Futurity

Midnight Robber’s Diasporic Constellations

Queer Families in Midnight Robber

THE CRUEL OPTIMISM OF

The Asianization of Aspiration

In 2007, Philips Norelco launched an ad campaign to promote their mois-

Reparative Practices: Life in the Gutter with Malinky Robot

S A LT F I S H F U T U R E S The Irradiated Transpacific

The pedigree of the clone is subaltern.

The Irradiated Transpacific: Afterlives of the American Lake

Speculating on Salt Fish Futures

Mutant Assemblages and Queer Desire

Postscript: Transpacific Ecologies

In an essay titled “The Rhetoric of Sex / The Discourse of Desire,” Samuel

Chapter 2. Homeland Futurity

Chapter 3. Speculation and the Speculum

Chapter 4. The Cruel Optimism of the Asian Century

Chapter 5. Salt Fish Futures

Adas, Michael. Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing

Abu Ghraib, 92, 94 assisted reproductive technologies (art), 81,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cuarón’s film Children of Men depicts a near-future dystopia in which