Bodies of tomorrow Vint, Sherryl
Bodies of tomorrow,
c2007, 20070224, 2006, 2000, 2007, 2006-01-01
eBook
Bodies of Tomorrowargues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world.
When Lieutenant Uhura took her place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek, the actress Nichelle Nichols went where no African American woman had ever gone before. Yet several decades ...passed before many other black women began playing significant roles in speculative (i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and horror) film and television—a troubling omission, given that these genres offer significant opportunities for reinventing social constructs such as race, gender, and class. Challenging cinema’s history of stereotyping or erasing black women on-screen, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before showcases twenty-first-century examples that portray them as central figures of action and agency. Writing for fans as well as scholars, Diana Adesola Mafe looks at representations of black womanhood and girlhood in American and British speculative film and television, including 28 Days Later, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Children of Men, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Firefly, and Doctor Who: Series 3. Each of these has a subversive black female character in its main cast, and Mafe draws on critical race, postcolonial, and gender theories to explore each film and show, placing the black female characters at the center of the analysis and demonstrating their agency. The first full study of black female characters in speculative film and television, Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before shows why heroines such as Lex in AVP and Zoë in Firefly are inspiring a generation of fans, just as Uhura did.
Early science fiction has often been associated almost exclusively with Northern industrialized nations. In this groundbreaking exploration of the science fiction written in Latin America prior to ...1920, Rachel Haywood Ferreira argues that science fiction has always been a global genre. She traces how and why the genre quickly reached Latin America and analyzes how writers in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico adapted science fiction to reflect their own realities. Among the texts discussed are one of the first defenses of Darwinism in Latin America, a tale of a time-traveling history book, and a Latin American Frankenstein. Latin American science fiction writers have long been active participants in the sf literary tradition, expanding the limits of the genre and deepening our perception of the role of science and technology in the Latin American imagination. The book includes a chronological bibliography of science fiction published from 1775 to 1920 in all Latin American countries.
From Frankenstein to futuristic feminist utopias, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction examines the ways science fiction writers have incorporated, explored, and revised conventional notions of sexual ...difference. Attebery traces a fascinating history of men's and women's writing that covertly or overtly investigates conceptions of gender, suggesting new perspectives on the genre.
Classical Traditions in Science Fiction is the first collection in English dedicated to the rich study of science fiction's classical heritage, offering a much-needed mapping of its cultural and ...intellectual terrain.
In 15 all-new essays, this volume explores how science fiction and fantasy draw on materials from ancient Greece and Rome, ‘displacing’ them from their original settings—in time and space, in points ...of origins and genre—and encouraging readers to consider similar ‘displacements’ in the modern world. Modern examples from a wide range of media and genres—including Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and the novels of Helen Oyeyemi, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and the role-playing games Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K—are brought alongside episodes from ancient myth, important moments from history, and more. All together, these multifaceted studies add to our understanding of how science fiction and fantasy form important areas of classical reception, not only transmitting but also transmuting images of antiquity. The volume concludes with an inspiring personal reflection from the New York Times-bestselling author of speculative fiction, Catherynne M. Valente, offering her perspective on the limitless potential of the classical world to resonate with experience today.
Paul Alkon analyzes several key works that mark the most significant phases in the early evolution of science fiction, including Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Connecticut ...Yankee in King arthur's Court and The Time Machine. He places the work in context and discusses the genre and its relation to other kinds of literature.
Noting that science fiction is characterized by an investment in
the proliferation of racial difference, Isiah Lavender III argues
that racial alterity is fundamental to the genre's narrative
...strategy. Race in American Science Fiction offers a systematic
classification of ways that race appears and how it is silenced in
science fiction, while developing a critical vocabulary designed to
focus attention on often-overlooked racial implications. These
focused readings of science fiction contextualize race within the
genre's better-known master narratives and agendas. Authors
discussed include Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and
Ursula K. Le Guin, among many others.
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