In our sixth episode we invite Dr. Lysa Rivera to tell us about Science Fiction literature from the late 1800s and early 1900s by African American authors. We also talk about the diverse roots of famous comic book heroes and the inclusive nature of Star Trek.
Dr. Rivera is our first non-scientist but she keeps us enthralled by stories of the connection between oppression, freedom and the draw of Science.
Here we go!
[♪ Blackalicious rapping “Chemical Calisthenics”♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around
♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them
♪ And they hit the ground
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Welcome to Spark Science, sharing stories of human curiosity. My name’s Regina Barber DeGraaff. I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University. And I’m here with my wonderful co-host, funny guy, Jordan Baker. How’s it going?
JORDAN BAKER: It is going well! How are you going today? [Laughing.] How are you going?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: How am I going?
JORDAN BAKER: Yes.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I’m going to interview for a Western professor, Dr. Lysa Rivera. And she is amazing. She does, um… She’s an English professor, so she’s our actually first non-scientist on this show.
- LYSA RIVERA: First humanist. [Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Humanist! The first humanist! [Laughing.] So, how’s it going, Lysa?
- LYSA RIVERA: It’s going really well.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: Thanks for having me. I’m excited.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: And a little nervous, but super excited.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Don’t-don’t be nervous.
- LYSA RIVERA: Okay, I won’t be nervous.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: We don’t bite. I don’t bite.
- LYSA RIVERA: Okay.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I don’t know about Jordan. [Laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: I failed out of English, so…
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh, I’m not nervous around you, then. [Laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: Okay. [Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Imagine he’s one of your students.
- LYSA RIVERA: There we go! [Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah! So the reason we have you on, Lysa, is because… um, many reasons. And I’m just gonna kind of inform the listeners. Uh, I teach at Western, but I also spend a lot of time doing outreach, and I want to make science more approachable. That’s really what this show is about. That’s why I have Jordan on here. I want to make science more approachable for Jordan. How’s it been working so far?
JORDAN BAKER: It’s pretty good?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It… really? Yeah?
JORDAN BAKER: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: ‘Cause I want honest opinions, but….
[Jordan Baker laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Um…
JORDAN BAKER: It gives me something to talk about.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right!
JORDAN BAKER: Like, with my wife, I’m like, “Hey,”—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
JORDAN BAKER: —”This is what happened on the show!”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Good! Well, so, I want to make science more approachable, but I also want to make it, um, I mean… have more diverse people come into science. Because if it’s all one like-minded kind of person in science, it’s really not good for development. It’s not good for problem solving. And you’ve probably known this, Lysa.
- LYSA RIVERA: I do….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: [Laughing.] Yeah. But as I was at an event, kind of related to diversity and inclusion, somebody told me that you have a wonderful class that kind of takes literature and science and inclusion, and I want you to tell something about that class right now.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right now?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, right now!
- LYSA RIVERA: Okay. Well, actually, I teach what you might call afrofuturism, which is a nice buzz word right now for… it’s an umbrella term that describes African-American speculative text. So, usually they aren’t scientists who are writing, but they are people interested in scientific discourse, and they use science—scientific discourse—to explore really touchy and sensitive subjects like race, which… is pretty touchy right now.
So, I teach a class that looks primarily at African-American science-fiction writers beginning in the 1890s, and I go all the way up to the 20th-21st century. And I’ve been teaching that class, I think, since 2008, at Western?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Okay.
- LYSA RIVERA: And it’s a really popular class. Students really like it.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It actually is a really popular class. And I was surprised that I had never heard about it before. I just talked to a student yesterday.
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And she had said… I mentioned the show, and I mentioned you were coming on, and she said, “Oh, yeah, doesn’t she teach a class on that?”
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And I said, “She does!” So, it’s actually really interesting, and-and, um… I do want to talk about real quick about what’s happening right now.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So, another student, just today, like two hours ago, told me about in the comic realm, there’s a lot of afrofuturism.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Okay.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes, there is. Milestone Comics, which was founded or established in the 1990s, is the first exclusively owned, and, um… all of the artists—all of the sketch artists and the writers—are black Americans. So, it’s a very… in some ways, it’s not an inclusionary outfit, in that way.
[Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff laughing.]
But the comics… what they do is… the writers take very popular tropes like the cyborg or the superhero, and they reimagine it in the context of like African-American social issues or cultural issues. And, um, so, you do see a lot of that. One-one that stands out is Dwayne McDuffie, who passed away a couple of years ago. He, uh, he has… he retells the Superman narrative and imagines, “What if—”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I was just about to bring up Superman, but go ahead. [Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: What if Superman, instead of following, like… What he imagines is a black Superman who falls out of the sky and onto a Midwestern, you know, farm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh no.
- LYSA RIVERA: And is raised like an American, and the comic is really… the plot is really about him coming to terms with his identity and also rethinking the notions of like, race and ethnicity really from the perspective of an African American. So, you get both a kind of fun and exciting superhero narrative that appeals to the readers who are into that, but then you also get this more sociological approach to thinking about race and identity, and you just don’t see that a lot in comics outside of that.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right, actually, when did Superman come out? I’m gonna look—
- LYSA RIVERA: You’ll have to tell me that!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I think it was in the 30s?
- LYSA RIVERA: Sounds, yeah?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I want to say it’s like—
JORDAN BAKER: I’ve never read a comic book, so I don’t know.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Really?
- LYSA RIVERA: Jordan! Oh my god!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Wow!
JORDAN BAKER: Sorry, guys.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Have you seen comic book movies? Like, Avengers, Superman…
- LYSA RIVERA: I saw Avengers….
JORDAN BAKER: I think I saw Superman… or something….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: You’d maybe like—
JORDAN BAKER: Maybe it was the Avengers—
- LYSA RIVERA: You’re missing out, Jordan—
JORDAN BAKER: I don’t know.
- LYSA RIVERA: You’re missing out.
JORDAN BAKER: Yeah.
[Dr. Lysa Rivera laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Like, the uh, old, like, 1970s or 80s Superman?
JORDAN BAKER: No.
[Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh.
JORDAN BAKER: [Laughing.] Like, the new one, with the… [Laughing.]
…shiny of suit of armor?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I could… I could not get through that one, actually.
- LYSA RIVERA: I haven’t even seen it.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: So, there we go.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Well, it’s… mmm….
I’m gonna try… [Laughing.]
I’m gonna try before Superman v Batman because Batman’s actually… I wanna take this time, ’cause I think this is really important. Before we actually get into science-fiction literature, let’s talk about—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —superheroes because I don’t know if you know this—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —either Jordan or you, Lysa, but Superman was written by two Jewish boys.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: In a Jewish neighborhood, and they actually made Superman have dark hair and be kinda nerdy like they were, and they kind of took the idea of, like, the Superman that Germans had and made him kinda Jewish.
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Like, the whole—
- LYSA RIVERA: I didn’t know.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —idea of being put in a capsule and being taken to Earth is very Moses-like.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And in the 1950s, Superman the radio show actually was a giant help in helping the FBI like take down the Ku Klux Klan.
- LYSA RIVERA: I did not know that.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So… um, yeah.
JORDAN BAKER: Superman: savin’ lives!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah!
- LYSA RIVERA: Well, I mean, while we’re talking comics, I just read somewhere like on the Huffington Post that-that there was talk about having a Latino Spider-Man.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Mm-hmm.
- LYSA RIVERA: Miguel….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: An afro-Latino—
- LYSA RIVERA: An afro-Latino, right! Thank you, yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —Spider-Man.
And so, listeners do not know this because I… they can’t see me, but my father’s Mexican, my mom’s Chinese. Actually, even if they did see me, they probably wouldn’t know these things.
[Dr. Lysa Rivera laughing.]
But I listen to Latino USA, which is a NPR radio show, and they talk about how the story of afro-Latinos isn’t really talked about.
- LYSA RIVERA: No.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: You know, you can be Latino, but you can also be from the islands, and you can be black.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mmm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But it’s… and they’re kind of in the middle. They don’t fit in with the, you know, the American black culture, but they don’t really fit into the Latino culture, too.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And it’s a very isolating kind of place.
- LYSA RIVERA: Well, and, actually, that leads me to talk really briefly about Junot Diaz’s… uh, one of his recent novels, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the protagonist is a Dominican American who loves comic books and loves science fiction. And he identifies with the character, the protagonist, in science fiction because they feel like outcasts, and they feel like alienated by the status quo. And so that’s a novel written by a US/Latino who’s also looking at, like, afro-Latino culture and the convergence of that and science fiction.
So it’s… it’s a really fascinating thing.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: One of the first superheroes ever in the United States was Zorro.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right, there we go.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: He was a Latino….
- LYSA RIVERA: There we go.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: No powers. He… actually, the person who made Batman was obsessed with Zorro.
- LYSA RIVERA: Really?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And he made… and Zorro was a very wealthy guy, you know? And his alter ego was Zorro, and his wealthy guy, normal persona was like, kind of this playboy, kind of nerdy, kind of guy. So, he did the same thing for Batman, and instead of kind of a fox, which was Zorro’s kind of animal, you know, relationship, it was a bat. And instead of like, you know, what was it?
- LYSA RIVERA: I didn’t know that!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, yeah, and, and—
- LYSA RIVERA: That’s cool!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Zorro had a cave, and so did Batman. So, a lot of people don’t know that, like, the comics they love and the superheroes they love really do have a much broader—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mmm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —reach than just kind of, I think, the majority-wide America, it’s—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —it actually is a lot more inclusive. And I want to go back to Superman real quick.
[Dr. Lysa Rivera laughing.]
‘Cause the first-ever comic book of Superman… I mean, what’s more isolating than being an alien where everybody that you’re ever related to is dead? [Laughing.] You know, like, your planet’s gone. You know? There’s a lot of like, Batman versus Superman, kind of, and they’re like, “Oh, Batman’s sad because his parents is dead.” I’m like, “Well, Superman’s whole civilization is dead.” You know, like?
- LYSA RIVERA: Right, right, right.
[Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But… but Superman was actually one of the champions for the, you know, underprivileged, for the downtrodden. The first comic, he saves a miner from a mine.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And because there’s a mine collapse. And there’s a mine collapse because the rich owner cut corners, and he didn’t have like, an alarm system and stuff like that. So this really pisses off Superman.
[Dr. Lysa Rivera laughing.]
And Superman goes…
JORDAN BAKER: Goes for it!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, no, it’s—
JORDAN BAKER: Keep going!
- LYSA RIVERA: This is awesome!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —it’s wonderful, ’cause he’s kind of… kind of a… can I say “badass”? [Laughing.]
He’s kind of a badass, right? So, he gets really pissed off, he saves this miner, and he’s like, “Who owns this mine?” And the miner is like, “That guy over there.”
He goes to the mansion, and there’s a party going on. And there’s all these rich people. Superman rounds up all the rich people and throws them in the mine. And then collapses the mine!
- LYSA RIVERA: Woah, he is a badass!
[Laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: Maybe he is!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, right? And then he… he’s like, “Repent!” And then they… they kind of do. And he’s like, “Oh, okay, then I’ll save you.” [Jordan Baker laughing.]
And he like, takes them back because… and, so again, this like Superman/Batman kind of conflict, this rivalry, if you actually think about it, it has a lot to do with socio-economics.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Superman hates rich people, and Batman’s super rich.
[Dr. Lysa Rivera laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: I’m so gonna see that movie when it comes out!
[Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Like, I kind of want to go see it right now.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I’m… I don’t think that they’re… they’re… they cut on that. But I mean… it’s… I mean….
So, like we’re gonna talk about today, we’re gonna talk about race, we’re gonna talk about socio-economic issues, and all that stuff and how it kind of relates to literature and pop culture.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And it’s really fascinating.
- LYSA RIVERA: That is fascinating. Thank you for letting us know about this backstory. Did you know about this, Jordan?
JORDAN BAKER: I had no idea. Um, I guess I hadn’t put much thought into superheroes.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Well, I was at the public library, and I found like a middle-school book, and it said, “Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan.” And it was a small book—
- LYSA RIVERA: Woah!
JORDAN BAKER: Wow.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —and I read through it, and I was like, “This is amazing.” It had pictures, guys.
- LYSA RIVERA: I want to see that!
[Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So, listeners, go to the library, get this book. It had pictures.
- LYSA RIVERA: Wow. That’s awesome.
[Jordan Baker laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: Picture book! Go check it out!
[Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Speaking of literature—
- LYSA RIVERA: “It has pictures.”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: All right. So, let’s go—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Let’s go on the Wayback Machine.
- LYSA RIVERA: Way back!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: The Wayback Machine, like The Time Machine written by—
[Jordan Baker making time machine noises.]
I don’t remember who wrote that now!
[Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: H.G. Wells!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: H.G. Wells!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: That’s right!
[Laughing.]
So, let’s go back to where your class starts.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So, you teach English 342 again?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes. I teach… this is an afrofuturism class. I teach it at multiple levels. And we start in the 1890s.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Mmkay.
- LYSA RIVERA: Which—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Which I think is fascinating.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: That there is this like, African-American writers in the 1890s writing about—
- LYSA RIVERA: Right!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —science fiction.
- LYSA RIVERA: Before avant la lettre, before science fiction actually existed as such, you have a handful of black American writers writing in what has become known as one of the most… one of the bloodiest, most violent decades, post-slavery, for African Americans. I often tell my students… the very first day, I give them a graph that shows them, “This is how many black Americans were lynched this one year.” And you average about two lynches a year, which they have a hard time even imagining.
Um, and the 1890s was called “The Nadir of Black American Race Relations in the United States” because it was a such a violent time.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: What’s a “nadir”?
- LYSA RIVERA: The nadir is the opposite of the zenith. So, you have the zenith, which is the high point, and then the nadir, which is the lowest point.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: ‘Cause I think of Ralph Nader.
JORDAN BAKER: Yeah! I was gonna say!
- LYSA RIVERA: Right, but it’s with an “i.”
JORDAN BAKER: ‘Cause it’s not Ralph Nader, okay?
- LYSA RIVERA: No, it’s not Ralph Nader. [Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Who is the low point for [inaudible.]
[Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: But during this time, it was very dark. It was very dismal. And… it was, you know, it was this sad thing because you had the abolition of slavery in the 1860s, and you had this brief window where there was this optimism, and there was some movements and progress. But in the south, um, the-the paradox is that the more the black Americans got power, the more white supremacy spoke out.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: And you see that, I think, right now, in the Obama age. We see a resurgence of some of this white xenophobia. Um, but in the 1890s, some black writers—admittedly the more privileged writers who had access to education—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: —took to speculative fiction to both interrogate the status quo and imagine alternatives to it. And so you have this… what I argue in my book is that, um, like the earliest known black science-fiction texts are responding to a very dystopian time through utopian narratives.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Which I think is crazy. I mean—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —it’s-it’s awesome.
- LYSA RIVERA: It is! It’s… and-and you had, uh, writers like Pauline Hopkins, Sutton Griggs, E.A. Johnson, who were not very well known during their time. Now they are. But they were really, really invested in sort of fighting the racism and the social injustice of their time through literary text. And you don’t… you know, you don’t see that as much during slavery and before. You see more writers sort of trying to accommodate the status quo to earn their freedom.
But by the 1890s, what you see are writers who are sort of just really fed up with the violence and the racism that was just glaringly, um, sort of keeping them in their place. And they turned to science fiction—which didn’t exist back then.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, what was it called back then?
- LYSA RIVERA: Well, it… I don’t think it was called anything back then. I think you see “science’d fiction,” or “scientific fiction,” or the merging of the two, more in the early 20th centuries? So, by the 1890s, I don’t think you even see the phrase “science fiction.” Maybe you know, Jordan?
JORDAN BAKER: Uh, I have no idea! [Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: Joke!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: No!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, no problem!
JORDAN BAKER: Just trying to catch me off guard! I just know nothing about….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It’s okay!
- LYSA RIVERA: It’s okay.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It’s okay. I actually knew near nothing. Jordan and I were probably on the same level as of last week.
- LYSA RIVERA: That makes me so happy.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But I went to Henderson’s here in Bellingham, Washington. Great bookstore, right across from Michael’s.
- LYSA RIVERA: Great town.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: A great town. Right across from Michael’s, another wonderful used bookstore. And I found this book which is just amazing. It’s called Decades of Science Fiction. Um, actually, before I get into that book, what is your book’s name? ‘Cause I would like for you to—
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh! Thank you!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, ’cause—
- LYSA RIVERA: Well, it’s not in print yet. Um—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Mmkay.
- LYSA RIVERA: It’s called Far Out.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Mmkay.
- LYSA RIVERA: The Science Fiction of Black America.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh.
- LYSA RIVERA: And the phrase “far out” is a quote from Ishmael Reed, who is African-American contemporary novelist.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Okay.
- LYSA RIVERA: And he has a quote where he says that being black in the United States is a far-out experience. And he thinks that… what better genre than science fiction to capture that? Right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: Because science fiction is all about alienation. Um, you know, encountering the “other.” Um, dealing with, you know, like, hyper-realities that seem so out of the norm. And what Ishmael Reed says is that that’s like what black people live on a day-to-day basis.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: So, he thinks, you know, that’s it’s a far-out experience. So that’s… that’s the book.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Jordan and I grew up in Lynden, so….
- LYSA RIVERA: So there’s that!
[Laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: So! All you Lynden listeners!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, hey Lynden listeners!
- LYSA RIVERA: What’s up, Lynden?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But the great thing about this book, and… when is actually?
- LYSA RIVERA: When is?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: When is your book gonna come out in print?
- LYSA RIVERA: My book is slated to come out in 2016, twenty-sixteen, in the fall, so.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Okay. We’re gonna have you back on, and we’re gonna talk about that book.
- LYSA RIVERA: Awesome.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Okay.
- LYSA RIVERA: I’ll read from it.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: That would be awesome!
- LYSA RIVERA: Or actually, I’ll ask Jordan to read from it.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yes!
JORDAN BAKER: All right!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yes! Please!
[Laughing.]
That would be great!
Um, but, yeah. So, this book says that before… before science fiction was called “science fiction,” it was actually called “scientific romances.”
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Or there were these pulps.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So, can you explain, what, like, “pulp” means? ‘Cause I really didn’t understand.
- LYSA RIVERA: I think… I think “pulp” refers to the paper that the books were printed on.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh, that’s amazing.
- LYSA RIVERA: And it was cheap.
JORDAN BAKER: Not written with orange juice?
- LYSA RIVERA: Not written with orange juice!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: That doesn’t come until the 60s.
JORDAN BAKER: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: No. Um, I think it refers to the—
JORDAN BAKER: Far out!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, exactly.
JORDAN BAKER: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: It refers to the type of paper that they used to print the books?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh, that’s right! Yeah, that’s what it says right here! [Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, and I think it’s because it was a cheap… a sort of, a cheap way to get, you know, these popular texts out into the public. And that was the dominant… what I call “genre fiction.” In the 1890s, you had books that were about adventures, or, you know, going to strange locales and discovering these hidden societies. And that was like actually a very commercially popular genre at the time. And it was, you know, largely printed in this pulp… uh, mediums, to reach more people—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: —to reach younger writers… er, younger readers.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So, this quote right here in this book says, uh, “These magazines used crude paper—”
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: “—that quickly deteriorated and featured flashy color covers to attract unsophisticated readers.”
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes. It was not, you know… science fiction has had to fight against that reputation. When I first started teaching afrofuturism at UW, I had colleagues and students just say to me, “You can get away with that? You can teach science fiction at the university level?” And—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Ah!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: How dare they!
[Jordan Baker laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: And not only was I teaching science fiction, but I was teaching science fiction by black people. And they were like, “Wow, that… that even exists?”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, who’s going to go to that? Unbeknownst to them, it’s one of the most popular classes—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —at Western.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: There was, um, magazines called “slicks.”
- LYSA RIVERA: I hadn’t heard of this.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And these were printed on better-quality paper and appealed to wealthier readers. [Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: Ahh. The hierarchy of paper.
JORDAN BAKER: The pulp kind of sounds like a 007 note ’cause it deteriorates really fast. [Laughing.] So you better read it before—
- LYSA RIVERA: Before it self-implodes!
JORDAN BAKER: —it disappears!
[Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Well, actually, you might be on to something, Jordan. Because if these pulp stories had really like, society-changing kind of, um, hard-to-talk-about issues—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —then you would want it to disintegrate, right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Absolutely.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: You would want people to find these things and get…
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: …you know… hurt.
- LYSA RIVERA: Especially if you’re a black American at the time because you’re dealing with one of the most violent times in history.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing “Wondaland” ♪]
♪ Early late at night
♪ I wander off into a land
♪ You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
♪ There’s a world inside
♪ Where dreamers meet each other
♪ Once you go, it’s hard to come back
♪ Let me paint your canvas as you dance
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I am Regina Barber DeGraaff with my co-host Jordan Baker. And we are talking to Dr. Lysa Rivera about sci-fi literature.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing “Wondaland” ♪]
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
♪ Your magic mind
♪ Makes love to mine
♪ I think I’m in love, angel
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ She thinks she left her underpants
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ She thinks she left her underpants
♪ The grass grows inside
JORDAN BAKER: So, in English—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
JORDAN BAKER: —342, or three-four-two, uh, what-what were some of the main authors that you would be teaching about?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. So, um, I look at… so the three writers I look at the turn of the century are Sutton Griggs, Pauline Hopkins, and E.A. Johnson, who actually isn’t in the syllabus that we’re looking at. And these writers were all sort of contemporary writers. They lived in different parts of the country, so they didn’t know each other, but independently, they were all sort of writing science fiction or speculative fiction with the same political program.
Um, and they… Griggs came from Texas. Hopkins was born in New England, and E.A. Johnson was born in North Carolina. So, you had, you know, like I said, a sort of nationwide kind of spreading… they were all spread out. And Griggs is the first person I look at. He wrote a book, self-published in 1899, called Imperium in Imperio. And what he does in that is he imagines a black secret society that functions as a government—as a shadow government to the United States government.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Ah.
- LYSA RIVERA: And in the secret society, it’s all black American citizens, and they run their own-their own economy. They have their own constitution. And what’s interesting with Griggs is he sort of draws from the founding fathers, like Jeffersonian ideals of democracy. But he re-imagines them from an African American perspective. And what that does is, for his readers, it sort of highlights what was wrong with the Constitution for black Americans at that time.
So he’s able to simultaneously imagine this utopian black society while also integrating the Constitution itself, which would have been really radical at the time, which is probably why he had to self-publish his book. And a little thing about Griggs is that he actually went door to door to sell his book.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh wow.
- LYSA RIVERA: Because it was so radical for the time—remember this is a really violent time—so he… he really… the only recourse he had was to sort of independently push his book. And he did that.
And it’s the one book of his—he wrote several books. He wrote non-fiction, mostly. He was more of a sociologist. But Imperium stands as his most popular book because I think it was, you know, in terms of genre, the most exciting book, right, where he’s imagining this secret society, so.
JORDAN BAKER: Uh, do you think… maybe it’s just speculative—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
JORDAN BAKER: —but were they writing in hopes to, like… I don’t know, like—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
JORDAN BAKER: —help other people?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
JORDAN BAKER: To learn? To get people to like, change?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
JORDAN BAKER: Or, was he doing it just to, like—
- LYSA RIVERA: To entertain?
JORDAN BAKER: —to get himself out? Not like—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm.
JORDAN BAKER: —get himself out there, but like—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
JORDAN BAKER: —get his ideas heard? Or?
- LYSA RIVERA: No, they were all… the three writers that I talk about, they were very explicit. They wanted to uplift the black race by proving to fellow black Americans, mostly, right? Their readership was mostly black Americans—you know, the few black Americans who had access to literacy—but the idea was to present to them images of black scientists or black, you know, sort of, black engineers, right?
So, to give black Americans a sort of image of blackness that was… that was, you know, going counter to the stereotypes of blackness, right, which was that black people, like… Thomas Jefferson, for instance…. He really, I mean, he basically says in one of his texts that black Americans, because of their race, are not capable of thinking scientifically. So, something like that, right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Wow.
- LYSA RIVERA: He’s-he’s… they’re writing… they’re writing science fiction to prove… against—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: —to-to disprove that. Right? So I don’t think they were necessarily thinking they were going to change much in terms of like structures of the government. But they were trying to sort of… they were writing against these really problematic stereotypes of blackness that I think still continue today.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: And that’s why, when I teach these texts, we talk a lot about how they resonate even today in society.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And you said Pauline—
- LYSA RIVERA: Pauline Hopkins, yes. So she’s one of my favorite writers. She was born in Portland, Maine. She grew up in Cambridge. And she wrote a novel called Of One Blood that was serially published, which means it was published, you know, monthly, in a magazine that she—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Like Sherlock Holmes was.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right! Right. And she… she published it in this magazine called The Colored American Magazine, which she was actually the editor of for about two years.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Wow.
- LYSA RIVERA: Which was totally unheard of.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: To have a black American woman.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: Edit—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Well, I think there’s… I mean, a lot of discussion even today. As we’re talking, like you were saying, of women of color, right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It’s… when we’re talking about women in science—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —it’s kind of hard to kind… I think, to see out there, women of color as—
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —in science. So….
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And I bet being in Maine probably made it a little easier than being, let’s say—
- LYSA RIVERA: In the south?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Somewhere else! [Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, she did… yeah, somewhere else, right! [Laughing.]
And she… and this novel, Of One Blood… what she does… I won’t talk about the plot so much, but what she does is… she takes….
So, she grew up—well, not grew up—she sort of spent most of her adult life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so she had access to Harvard, and she would go to lectures at Harvard. And she was fascinated by William James, who was this, you know, considered sort of the founding American psychologist, right? And at that time, psychology was this new science, and it wasn’t… it wasn’t given a lot of credit by, like, the old guard. It was still seen as this, like, sort of soft science that wasn’t real.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: That still happens.
- LYSA RIVERA: That still happens, right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: As a woman-of-color scientist, physicist—
- LYSA RIVERA: You see that! Right!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —I see all of these things.
- LYSA RIVERA: Okay! So, she… she basically… she… appropriates psychological discourse that was popular at the time. And she-—again—like Griggs, she imagines it from the perspective of a black American. So she looks at James’s theory that everybody is born with multiple selves, right? That we all have like an unconscious, and he’s getting this from Freud. A conscious self, an unconscious self.
And what she does is she imagines that-that idea of the layered self, but she looks at it from the perspective of an African American, who she says we have… she’s-she’s sort of playing around with this notion of double consciousness, that to be black in the United States is to be both African and American, and you’re sort of stuck in the middle because you don’t identify with Africa, but you’re not seen as American.
And she kind of looks at that dilemma through William James. And so that’s her novel, The Hidden Self. Of One Blood. Of One Blood, The Hidden Self is largely about sort of looking at the African heritage of black Americans and kind of reclaiming that as a good thing as opposed to this thing that we should oppress.
So, it was really… that-that book in particular I think students really like because she imagines really interesting sort of narratives of hypnosis and mesmerism, and they really gravitate towards that. But she’s looking at it with issues of race being foremost, so.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah. I um, so. I referred to this book earlier, this Decades of Science Fiction, and one short story in it was by H.G. Wells.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mmmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And, um, it’s… it came out the exact same year as—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —as Griggs’s, um, 1899.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And it’s-it’s so interesting to me as you’re talking, hearing the motives of the authors we’re talking about now, um, uh, you know, Hopkins and Griggs versus the motives of H.G. Wells—
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —and the motives of Jules Verne. First of all, H.G. Wells isn’t American.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: He’s English. And Jules Verne is French. I didn’t know these things until I read this book.
[Laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: This is news to me!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: This is news—yeah! Right? [Laughing.] Jordan, don’t feel bad, seriously. I-I spent a day on this.
JORDAN BAKER: Gonna Google it later to check it out.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right, to check it out.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But I mean, I think H.G. Wells was kind of, um… he was writing stories to kind of warn people. Like, “Technology is good to a point. Let’s make sure we have this moral compass as we’re using this technology.” So I mean, there is a slight relationship to these authors about this moral compass, but I-I mean… I read this story—it’s called The Crystal Egg—so, I don’t know… I was, I was telling—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. Sounds crazy!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —Dr. Rivera here this morning of… or before the taping, about this. And I’ll tell you, Jordan.
So, it’s a short story by H.G. Wells, around the same time. And it’s about… the first part of it is super boring. [Laughing.]
So I’m reading this, and it’s just this… this shopkeeper, he has a terrible marriage, he has step children, he gets in this fight with customers, which one of ’em he describes as “oriental.”
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But again, at the time, that was okay.
- LYSA RIVERA: That was okay. That was fine.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It’s not okay now, listeners.
- LYSA RIVERA: Nope!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: He describes these two men that come in, and they try to buy this crystal egg that’s in his window. And he starts freaking out. And you… as a reader, you have no idea why he’s freaking out.
So the very beginning of the story—very, very boring. The crystal egg goes missing, and you’re like, “When is the story gonna pick up?” [Clears throat.] But what happens is, suddenly the story shifts. And you realize this crystal egg didn’t go missing; he hid it. He brought it in the body of a dead animal ’cause he does taxidermy, too.
JORDAN BAKER: Great.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Of course! And he brought it to a scientist that he knew, just a friend, and that scientist, he tells him… this shopkeeper tells the scientist, “This is a very strange object. It glows in the darkness, sometimes, not all the time. And sometimes, when I look through it, I can see the landscape of another world.” And the scientist is like, “Sure!” You know? Like, “Sure, okay.”
But then, the scientist start seeing, and he starts taking notes like crazy. And then after a few months, they realize that this is actually a window to another world, and it shows you 360 views of a whole landscape. You can also see winged humanoid creatures looking back at you. Right?
- LYSA RIVERA: That’s awesome.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And so, it’s-it’s this amazing story, and at the end, um, the shopkeeper loves it so much. It’s like, that’s his real life now. He would rather escape into this crystal egg than live with this terrible, terrible marriage and his terrible stepchildren.
So, the scientist doesn’t find the egg, doesn’t hear from his friend for like two weeks. He goes to his shop, and it turns out he died. With the egg clutched in his hand. And he goes, “Okay, well, where’s the egg?” Asks the—you know, the widow now. And she goes, “Oh, yeah. I sold it.”
- LYSA RIVERA: Huh.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So the end of the story, you have no idea where this egg is. You don’t know what world it was… it was having a window to. They speculated that it was Mars in the story, which links to our other episodes, listeners, listeners.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And, but, it’s just this amazing story of like, this other world. And, but it’s very scary in the other sense that like, this guy, this shopkeeper, would rather do that than live his own life.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So it was a very, very interesting kind of happy-yet-sad story. But Jules Verne, on the other hand, had these happier things, like, “Technology is going to bring us to the future. It’s gonna help everyone.”
- LYSA RIVERA: It’s gonna modernize us, yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right. It’s gonna help everyone. Let’s not be afraid. So, my question to you, with your authors, did they kind of have the same idea of technology? Did they feel that technology would help them and also the mainstream American as well?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah! That’s such a good question. ‘Cause as you were talking, I was thinking for-for black Americans at the time, the egg would have been a symbol for like, the power of imagination, to imagine alternatives to this violent status quo. Um. [Clears throat.]
But the writers I look at actually aren’t scientifically trained, so they don’t have as much interest in actual science. [Laughs.] For them, science is a dispersive terrain where they can imagine, like, alternative societal norms, and they can imagine remedies to racism. Um, I think that that said… Hopkins, like I said, she was interested in psychology, so for her….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: She must have taken some science classes.
- LYSA RIVERA: She did. And she… and she, like I said, she followed William James around. She went to his lectures. She was very taken by him. Um, and I think that for her, the new psychology was a kind of science that enabled her to explore what it means to be black in the United States and what that relationship is to Africa, right? Because they were seen as, like I said, sort of trapped in this category. They’re not fully American, but they’re not African, either.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: They’re African American, and what does that mean? And that kind of ambiguity, um, was a-was a thorn for her and for a lot of writers, and I think… I think science… scientific discourse, um, enabled… specifically for her, psychology, enabled her to sort of wrestle with those questions.
But you do have, like, there’s another writer, E.A. Johnson, who wrote…. [Clears throat.]
…uh, a novel in 1906 called Light Ahead for the Negro. And in that novel, he imagines this like air balloon-type thing that he… he picks up from—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: A very Jules Verne-y thing.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes! And-and it goes up into the air, and it gets like warped into the year 2006. So he’s imagining, in 1906, what he imagines is a post-racial egalitarian society.
[Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff laughs.]
That, sadly, didn’t exist in 2006. [Laughing.] This would have been a year after Katrina, so it wasn’t quite happening.
But he-he imagines, like you here, he’s taking science to, again, sort of play with these ideas of what would our society look like if there was a massive redistribution of wealth so that people of color could be middle class, for instance?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: Or, what would this society look like if suddenly white supremacy was just completely gone? And so, again, he-he takes these motifs that he’s seeing in what… you know, in speculative texts at the time that were highly popular, and he’s sort of, you know, using those to-to force his readership to think about race, to think about identity, to think about power, in a really subversive way. But the way they get away with it is they’re writing science fiction.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: It’s not real. So they’re not writing realistic literature, and so they can actually sort of safely explore these ideas because they’re… because it’s fantasy. It’s not seen as real, so it’s okay.
JORDAN BAKER: Um, I just have a quick question. Anything that they wrote about…
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm. Did it come true?
JORDAN BAKER: Yes.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I knew you were gonna ask that! Thank you!
- LYSA RIVERA: Ah! I wish I could say yes, but the utopians that they imagined aren’t real.
JORDAN BAKER: Was there any of like the science fiction that even like…
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-him.
JORDAN BAKER: …somebody like me would… just like, an uneducated, like, random thing would…
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
JORDAN BAKER: …was any of that like, accurate?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, were… what were the like details of his predictions in 2006? Like, in this utopian society?
- LYSA RIVERA: Ah. Well, some of it comes… some of it’s real. Like, he does imagine in the future that black Americans will have, like, equal representation in the media, that they will be more representations of blackness like in newspapers and in… and in….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I wouldn’t say it was equal, but there was more. [Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. I mean there is… I think… even if it doesn’t come true, even if the ideal societies that they imagine haven’t come true… for contemporary science fiction writers like Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, who I also teach in this class, what they would argue is that, “Well, okay, so these things aren’t happening, but the fact that we’re imagining black Americans in the future, right, is-is important, right?”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: And so for these early writers, just the idea of having black Americans persist into the future… that was radical. Like, “We’re gonna have a future. We’re not gonna die out,” right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: And so, in that sense, it’s totally become true, right? You have, you know, contemporary black writers today who are, you know, sort of attesting to that. So….
[♪ Janelle Monae singing “Wondaland” ♪]
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ The grass grows inside
♪ The music floats you gently on your toes
♪ Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
JORDAN BAKER: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I am Jordan Baker. And we’re talking with Dr. Lysa Rivera about science-fiction literature.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing “Wondaland” ♪]
♪ Don’t freak and hide
♪ I’ll be your secret Santa, do you mind?
♪ Don’t resist
♪ The fairygods will have a fit
♪ We should dance
♪ Dance in the trees
♪ Paint mysteries
♪ The magnificent droid plays there
♪ Your magic mind
♪ Makes love to mine
♪ I think I’m in love, angel]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It’s-it’s, for me, it’s essential to have some sort of hope that in the future, things will be better. Right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I mean, like, as a kid, growing up in the county. [Laughs.]
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And, uh, and, uh being mixed race—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —I mean, it wasn’t great, but I had faith that in the future, things would be better. And a similar story—and I’m just gonna go right into it—
- LYSA RIVERA: Totally.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —is Whoopi Goldberg. Um, so, in Star Trek Next Generation, as our listeners know, I am a big fan. Jordan is not.
JORDAN BAKER: Never seen it.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right. [Laughing.] But Star Trek Next Generation, there were only two cast members that were giant fans of the original Star Trek. And do you want to guess who those two people were? Jordan, go!
JORDAN BAKER: Umm.
- LYSA RIVERA: I’m gonna guess one.
JORDAN BAKER: Charlie and Josh?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Since you haven’t seen it! [Laughing.] So, what’s your guess?
- LYSA RIVERA: Nichelle Nichols? Is she…?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh, no, sorry, no, the cast of The Next Generation—
- LYSA RIVERA: Ohh.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFFF: —were big fans of the original Star Trek. So, which two casts of The Next Generation were big fans of the original cast?
- LYSA RIVERA: I have no idea.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Our station manager, what do you think?
STATION MANAGER: Um, Roseanne?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: No!
STATION MANAGER: No? Really? That’s surprising.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: The two fans were LeVar Burton—
- LYSA RIVERA: LeVar Burton, of course!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: From Reading Rainbow, Roots! And Whoopi Goldberg. So Whoopi Goldberg, around the time that Star Trek Next Generation was put together, had won an Oscar for The Color Purple. But she was obsessed with Star Trek, and this is why. And I’ll tell you another story about Whoopi after this first one.
JORDAN BAKER: Sounds like a nerd!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: She’s awesome, right?
- LYSA RIVERA: I love her!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So, when she was a kid, she saw Star Trek, the original, with Kirk and Uhura, and, uh…
- LYSA RIVERA: Uh-huh.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: …and Spock. And she saw it on TV, and she was amazed. And she saw Uhura, who was fourth, ranking fourth, like after the captain and two other people, if they were all gone, she would be captain. This is a black woman on TV, and she saw her, like, you know, manning the controls, being respected, and she was like, freaked out, ran into the kitchen, and said, “Mom! There’s a black lady on TV, and she’s not a maid!”
- LYSA RIVERA: And she’s in space!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And—yeah! And, well, it’s the future, right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yep.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And it was something to look forward to. And-and at that moment, she said, “I loved science fiction.”
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And LeVar Burton had the same feeling. And even though she won the Oscar for The Color Purple, she actually was friends with LeVar because of Roots and just Hollywood, and said, “I need to be on Star Trek. I need to be on Star Trek Next Generation.“
And he says, he says, “Okay, but… I’ll ask,” you know. And he asked, uh, the creator—what was his name? Um…
- LYSA RIVERA: Roddenberry?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Roddenberry. He asked Roddenberry.
JORDAN BAKER: Roddenberry.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Roddenberry, yeah. [Laughing.] “Um, Whoopi Goldberg wants to be on our show.” And he’s like, “Uh, she got an Oscar. She’s a movie star. I don’t think she wants to be on our show.” Like, he just didn’t believe him!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And he’s like, “No, really!” And so, weeks go by, she calls up LeVar, and she’s like, “So, what happened?” And he’s like, “Well, I asked.” And she’s like, “Ask again!” You know? [Laughs.]
And he’s like, “I don’t—they don’t think you want to be on the show ’cause you’re a movie star.” And she’s like, “I do want to be on this show.” You know?
So they actually made Ten Forward, which is the bar in Star Trek. You know this, Jordan.
JORDAN BAKER: Bar?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And they made that—there’s a bar on the ship.
JORDAN BAKER: Wow.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And she was the bartender. They had to make that for her because she wanted to be on the show.
- LYSA RIVERA: That’s awesome!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And it was amazing to see people in the future that looked like you because it is scary, right? It was a scary time, and you don’t know if, you know, you would be welcomed.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: For me, there was no Latinas or Latinos in any of the Star Trek until they had, um, uh, Torres, who was half-Klingon—
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —and half, um, Hispanic. Um, with Star Trek: Voyager.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And I was so happy. I was just like, “Oh, there’s somebody who’s mixed like me!”
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I was just, you know, it made me so happy to see that.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, and the Klingon being a mo—a-a trope for that mixedness, right? Like, she’s part-Klingon—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: —part-humanoid or human, and—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: —so, yeah, yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But I mean, as we all know, Hispanic people are all mixed, anyway, right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Right. Totally. Mestizo.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. Absolutely!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But anyway, yeah. That’s my Star Trek story. You said you also have a Star Trek story?
- LYSA RIVERA: I do! So, Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original, um… she wrote an autobiography several years ago. And there’s a part of it where she talks about how she was at a party, and, um, she had planned to leave Star Trek to pursue other jobs. Um, you know, she had other opportunities.
And at this party was Martin Luther King. And he… somehow got wind of the fact that she was thinking of leaving Star Trek. And-and—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: This was after the first year of Star Trek. She was only on for one year.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. And he walked up to her, and this what she said. He walked up to her, and he said, “I hear you’re thinking of leaving Star Trek,” and she said, “Yeah, I have these other opportunities.” And, according to her, he begged her not to leave.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Mm-hmm.
- LYSA RIVERA: And he was a big fan. He was a Trekkie. And she says that he… he told her just point blank, “You need to stay on this show because young black children need to see black people in space. They need to see black people in the future.” They need to see black people who can, like… who relate to technology in the same, you know, a white person does, which is not… which is not… you know, in some sort of “subservient way,” but they can master it, and they can make it. They can be scientists, and they can be technologically adept.
And she stayed on the show. And that… I always begin my class with that anecdote
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: Because it’s a powerful anecdote, and it gives… it sort of sets the tone for the class, which is… these writers had… there was a lot at stake for them when they were writing science fiction. There was more to it than just, sort of, reimagining science fiction. But there was a… an urgency there that you don’t see as much with other writers?
So, that’s my… that’s my Star Trek story. It’s not as good as yours. But it’s pretty good.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I love it! [Laughs.]
JORDAN BAKER: I have a quick Star Trek story.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh, awesome, Jordan!
JORDAN BAKER: Um, Jake, Gina’s husband—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yes.
JORDAN BAKER: —that was my neighbor growing up.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yes.
JORDAN BAKER: And for, I believe it was Christmas one year, he got his dad a Klingon dictionary.
[Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh my, I didn’t even—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I actually… I don’t even know this story!
JORDAN BAKER: He had no idea it was in a different language! Like, what?!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah… [Laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: Like, how do you watch the show if you have to have a dictionary to like… you have to figure out a whole language? That’s too much of a show for me! [Laughing.]
- LYSA RIVERA: That’s too much, yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So this is how my husband turned Jordan off from Star Trek.
[Laughing.]
The end!
[Laughing.]
I-I did not know that story, Jordan! Awesome!
Yeah, no, I mean… I want to get back to what you were saying, that there’s a lot at stake for these authors. And I-I think this happens in science, too.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I do a lot of work trying to create diversity in science because there’s not a lot of us, right?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And not only is it very, very hard to get to where we are, you know, having PhDs or Master’s degrees, or even Bachelor’s degrees in science. But once you get there, there’s much pressure on you to be like, the voice.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: You know, to be the pitcher. You know? And, um, not only do you have to do your own work and try to be a very respectable scientist—which you get a lot of judgment from other scientists—but you also have to be a respectable person of color.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Or a respectable woman.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: A lot of people get that. “Now, you’re a woman of color! Oh my gosh!” Right? It just keeps on going. And, you know, LGBT issues, low-income, disabilities, I mean…. people from underprivileged groups know what I’m talking about.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: So, um, I mean….
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: It’s sad, but it’s not surprising—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —to hear about these authors also feeling that giant obligation—
- LYSA RIVERA: Or—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —that feeling of urgency and obligation.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. And it’s sad. The writers that I spotlight in the first part of the book… they largely died… I mean—I hate to say this—somewhat penniless. Because they were, you know, they were living… they had these wonderful ideas, and they had these… some sort of subversive politics, but they were living, like I said, in a time of… of such violence and racism and oppression, that… you know, it is sad.
They died—Hopkins in particular, I think because she’s a woman—she… she died in obscurity. And most of the writers that I look at, a lot of people even in African-American studies don’t even know who they are!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: ‘Cause they’re just not very well known, right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: And I think it’s partly because they didn’t… Partly because they were living in a time where there just wasn’t that opportunity for them.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: But now what’s cool is that their legacy is, you know, obviously still matter? It still matters?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: And, I, you know, part of my project in my book is to… to… I wanna both expand African-American literary studies, and I want to expand science-fiction studies.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: I want people to understand that science fiction has this-this other side to it, this other story, these other stories.
Um, and, incidentally, I do also teach a class called Chicano Futurism, which maybe we can do for another show, I don’t know?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah. When you have your book—come back, we’ll do—
- LYSA RIVERA: Right. And in that project, I’m looking at Mexican-American science-fiction writers, who we don’t begin to see until much later.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Like Zorro.
- LYSA RIVERA: Like 1990. Or like Zorro, there we go.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Except for him.
- LYSA RIVERA: Except for him! [Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But yeah, I mean, I think the whole… the whole dying penniless, I mean, that’s… that’s… I mean, just to play Devil’s advocate…
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: A lot of other artists—
- LYSA RIVERA: This is true—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —also died penniless. But you’re right. I mean, first, you want to be an artist. You want to say… You want to express yourself, which isn’t very, uh, profitable.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But it’s compounded by being a person of color.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And that’s what happens. It’s compounded by being a woman. It’s compounded by being in these… these other, underrepresented groups.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Where some artists, they die penniless because they’re trying to get out their word, but they also have maybe a substance abuse.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right. Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And that’s why they die penniless.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: But these people that die penniless because they’re trying to do art, and—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —and because, um, they aren’t being supported, by you know, the mainstream society.
- LYSA RIVERA: No, and, actually, this is a good time to mention that um, Pauline Hopkins was an editor of Colored American Magazine for a couple of years. She got fired by Booker T. Washington.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: [Gasps.] Not Booker T!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes! So, likd, if you’ve studied the 1890s, you quickly become aware that black conservatism was also a force to reckon with if you’re someone like Sutton Griggs or Pauline Hopkins. They identified more with black radical politics.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: But at the time, Booker T. Washington was, if I can say this, he was sort of in bed with the white status quo. [Laughing.] Not literally, right, but you know, he… he….
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Figuratively.
- LYSA RIVERA: Figuratively, please, figuratively. But that… the only way that you could really be well-known as a black American at that time was if you were conservative. And Hopkins and Griggs and Johnson weren’t.
And so part of the reason that they, you know… they had to fight… they weren’t just pushing back against white supremacy. They were pushing back against black conservatism, which is something in-in Imperium in Imperio. In fact, his utopian society collapses because of black conservatism. Because of the sort of suppression within—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Wow!
- LYSA RIVERA: —you know, black American communities, to sort of, you know, appease the white status quo. But these writers were-were radical. They were not willing to do that. And-and… Hopkins is a perfect example of someone who literally gets fired from the journal because of her politics. And she’s not fired by a white supremacist but by a black American. So, they were dealing with it on many levels.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing “Wondaland” ♪]
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
- LYSA RIVERA: I’m sorry, but you just look so much like Macklemore, am I right?
[Laughing.]
Can we just get that out there?
[♪ Janelle Monae singing “Wondaland” ♪]
♪ This is your land
♪ This is my land
♪ We belong here
♪ Stay the night
♪ I am so inspired
JORDAN BAKER: We talk a lot about your English class, 342. I’m just… looking at this piece of paper.
[Laughing.]
About historical, uh—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mmm-hmm.
JORDAN BAKER: —authors. But is there anything that’s sort of like more current? Uh, time?
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. Absolutely. So, a phrase I-I-I keep tossing around the term “afrofuturism,” which is sort of a new term in a sense. Well, not totally new. We first begin to see it in 1994, where you have, uh, Mark Dery interviewing Samuel Delany, who’s an African-American science-fiction writer who’s a genius writer. And afrofuturism, basically, just refers to black speculative fiction—either African-American or Afro-Caribbean—um, that’s sort of appropriating the genre to explore issues central to race.
And so, afrofuturism has exploded. Like, um, you-you know, conferences now will be devoted to afrofuturism. Um, books have come out on afrofuturism, and my book being one of them. So there’s—there’s just been a huge interest in, you know, within the academy, at least? Um, and—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: The academy?
- LYSA RIVERA: Uh, the university, like academia. Right? Right? Not the Starfleet! [Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh, okay. I was like… I got excited.
- LYSA RIVERA: I know you did! I hate to burst your bubble, but not that academy.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Not San Francisco’s Starfleet Academy.
- LYSA RIVERA: No.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Got it.
- LYSA RIVERA: But afrofuturism, I think I might have mentioned it earlier, before the show, that one person I met at a conference referred to afrofuturism as the Harlem Renaissance of the day. Which is… the Harlem Renaissance refers to a period in black history in the United States where you have this flourishing of black American writers, like Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, and they’re all writing at the same time. And there’s this optimism about black art, right?
And so, afrofuturism has—is seen right now by a lot of academics, at least—as like the second coming of that, where you just have writers coming out who producing work that are selling. And… one example of this is Octavia Butler, who we look at in this class. She’s the first… she’s the first science-fiction writer ever to win the MacArthur Genius Grant, which is a huge honor.
Um, and she… she, you know, what I tell my students is, “Look. She won this because of her writing. She didn’t win this because she was the first black American woman writing science fiction. She brings science fiction to this level.” Right? And so she’s… she’s literally the first science-fiction writer to get this kind of recognition?
And I think that speaks volumes to the progress or to the strides made by black science fiction writers. It’s that they’re actually uplifting the genre, right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right. They’re not just uplifting the African-American science-fiction genre.
- LYSA RIVERA: Right. They’re bringing science fiction to the minds of people, and they’re saying, “This is a real… this is a serious genre. This isn’t just pulp. This is real literature wrestling with real questions that are very important.” And so, in that way, you know, you have people like… um, Steven Barnes, Tanner Dune [sp?], Nalo Hopkinson, who are all black writers inhibiting science fiction. And they’re… they’re sort of coming at it differently than their… than the figures that I talk about earlier. But they are… they’re sort of evidence, you know, to the fact that-that afrofuturism is a viable and-and, just, extraordinarily popular genre.
And so, in that way, you have a lot of movement.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, I was… like I said earlier, I was talking to a student who had gone to the Emerald City Comic Con—
- LYSA RIVERA: Mmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I go there, too. My daughter and I dress up like superheroes. And, um, she said that there’s a giant section of the Emerald City Comic Con just devoted to afrofuturism, and—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —and the comics devoted to that.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. Yeah. I think-I think, you know, I think it’s largely because of people like Butler and Delany, who are… who sort of brought… you know, Delany wrote this… this novel called Dhalgren in the 70s, which is just… literally changed the face of science fiction. It was-it was hailed as this like, you know, this new direction in science fiction.
And-and the fact that he was black was secondary, right? That these people were not… you know, the writers who admired him were admiring what he was doing to the genre. And they weren’t… they weren’t… you know, he wasn’t like that token representative of the race.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: He was like, “Look. I’m a science-fiction writer, and I’m pushing the boundaries of this genre. And I happen to be black.”
And so, you know, there—you have this sort of recognition—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Like Neil deGrasse Tyson is doing for astrophysics.
- LYSA RIVERA: There you go! Or like you’re doing!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Oh, yeah, thank you!
[Laughing.]
Well, tell us more! I mean, you’re saying all these names—
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —and I feel terrible because I don’t know any of them.
JORDAN BAKER: I don’t know ‘em, either.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, Jordan maybe doesn’t feel terrible!
[Laughing.]
But… tell us about Octavia Butler, please.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. So Octavia Butler was born in Los Angeles. And she grew up, you know, in relative poverty, was raised by a single mother; her father died when she was a baby. And rumor has it, she went to the movie theater and saw a science-fiction movie when she was twelve. And she thought it was so terrible! And she said to her mom, “I can—I can write better science fiction!” And that’s sort of what inspired her.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: And, um—
JORDAN BAKER: Woah! What-what movie was it?
- LYSA RIVERA: Oooh. I know, right, Jordan? I want to know!
[Laughing.]
JORDAN BAKER: Jeez!
- LYSA RIVERA: But it was probably one of those B movies that you see at Rocket Donuts on the television.
JORDAN BAKER: Oh, yeah, yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: You know, one of those kind of pulp versions of science-fiction films.
JORDAN BAKER: For those of you in Lynden, Rocket Donuts is a donut franchise in Bellingham.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yes. Free plug!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, they should come up here.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, it’s really good.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, they should give us money.
JORDAN BAKER: Yeah… donuts! [Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Okay, so… so, she saw this science-fiction movie, and she’s like, “Pshh. I could totally do better than this.”
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, and so her first famous book is called Kindred. Which, actually… I went to see her read once. She passed away in 2006, so I was lucky to see her read before that. And she… she insisted that Kindred, which, it came out in 1979, isn’t science fiction? Because it doesn’t have anything like “science-y” in it?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Mmm.
- LYSA RIVERA: But it’s basically about this woman—this African-American woman living in Los Angeles in 1976—who gets thrust back to the antebellum south. And she-she meets her slave ancestors, right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Mm.
- LYSA RIVERA: And she uses the trope of time travel to explore the ways in which racism during slavery persists into the present.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: And so, she’s gone on… she went on to write a lot of other texts. Unlike a lot of the earlier writers I look at, more contemporary writers like Butler and Delany… they’re more interested in dystopian motifs. Because what they want to do… they’re-they’re interested in looking at the present, um, and not so much imagining alternatives, but really interrogating the status quo, right?
For Delany in particular, he’s very… he’s very explicit in saying that one of the problems of, you know, quote-unquote “white” science fiction is that when it imagines the future, it largely imagines a colorblind society.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: And for someone like Delany and Butler, they thought that was highly problematic. Because… you know, what they wanted to ask is, “Well, what would it take to get to this post-race, and why are we imagining these post-race societies, but we’re not willing to look at the racism that’s happening today?” And so for them, science fiction was a way to sort of interrogate like these new forms of slavery, so to speak, that were happening, you know, in the 20th and 21st century.
And so they have a slightly different motivation, but still, they’re appropriating scientific discourse to explore issues central to race. So, in that way, they’re the same, but they are also, you know, coming at it slightly differently.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah, I was, um, I’m-I’m just listening to you talk—
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: —talk about this. And I keep on thinking back to Pauline Hopkins. I don’t know why. I mean, I think you’re talking about Octavia, a woman….
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I don’t know. I keep thinking about Pauline Hopkins and this idea of sociology and psychology.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah, mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And it… it just instantly brings me to another science-fiction author that I’m a very big fan of, and that’s Isaac Asimov.
- LYSA RIVERA: Mm-hmm.
JORDAN BAKER: Oh! Isaac!
- LYSA RIVERA: Your favorite, right Jordan?
JORDAN BAKER: Touches my heart!
[Laughing.]
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah. I’m surprised Jake didn’t get you to read that book, too! So, Isaac Asimov wrote the famous trilogy, the Foundation. Well, it wasn’t just a trilogy; it just kept on going and going and going.
But he was a physicist, and like we mentioned earlier, sometimes, sociology and psychology get kind of a bad rap.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Hopefully, we’re going to get a psychologist actually on our show soon. So, um, we’ll try to—we’ll try to fix that.
JORDAN BAKER: Not just to diagnose our problems?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: I’m actually going to tell her that we’re both middle children! [Laughing.]
But anyway, in the—the great thing about Isaac Asimov is, even though he was a physicist, he imagined this society that really took the idea of sociology and this idea of kind of, “You can’t tell what one individual person will do, but you can tell what a whole bunch of people in a group will do, and you can kind of predict what will happen in the future if you treat people as a giant lump sum.”
- LYSA RIVERA: Right.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And, um, it was a really interesting kind of series about that, and-and, so… when I’m thinking about science fiction and sociology and-and like you were saying, it wasn’t kind of science fiction because of sociology, but I think there’s a lot of intertwined ideas.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: And, um…
- LYSA RIVERA: Well, just—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Go ahead.
- LYSA RIVERA: I can’t help but… when you mention Asimov, I mean, I, Robot with Will Smith, right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: Was… you know, as an afrofuturist scholar, when that movie came out, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is a Hollywood science-fiction movie with a black protagonist. This is afrofuturism!”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right!
- LYSA RIVERA: But I mean—
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Sadly, that was like one of his worst, like, stories.
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah… It really… yeah… I feel like that’s why I always like when I read it, I like drawing connections between imagined world in science fiction and the world that I’m living in (or the world that the author is living in). That’s really exhilarating. And there’s a term, actually, in science-fiction studies, called defamiliarization. Which, I’m going to get all technical now.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: That’s good! That’s why you’re here!
- LYSA RIVERA: Right, right, right! And it comes from Russian formalism, believe it or not.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Which “robot” comes from Russian!
- LYSA RIVERA: There we go! Right?
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Link!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah! Ba ding! But “defamiliarization” simply means when an artist takes something familiar and makes it strange. And the goal in doing that is to make the spectator think more deeply about that thing being defamiliarized.
So, if you take something like Blade Runner, right, the thing that’s being defamiliarized in that movie is what it means to be a human. And we don’t walk around every day thinking, “What makes us human? What separates us from an android?”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: And so when you put that device in the hands of a black American or a Mexican American, right, they’re going to defamiliarize things like race. “What is race?”
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: What does it mean to talk about race as this thing that exists when geneticists have already said, look, it doesn’t exist, you know, on that level, and yet, race organizes society.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right.
- LYSA RIVERA: So, I find—I find, in thinking about your earlier question about like what contemporary afrofuturists are doing, I think it’s still the spirit of defamiliarization. That they want their readers to think twice about things that we normally take for granted.
And in this country, when you’re talking about race… like, this a subject that people get very uncomfortable thinking about.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yes.
- LYSA RIVERA: But their books really force you to come to terms with it or at least confront it, and that’s like—that’s exhilarating to me, so.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Right. Thank you for being on our show!
- LYSA RIVERA: Yeah! Thanks for having me!
JORDAN BAKER: Thank you!
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: We’ve learned so much about this. You’ve given me so many things that I want to read now.
- LYSA RIVERA: Oh! Well, I’m… I’m really happy about that!
JORDAN BAKER: I might have to watch Star Trek.
- LYSA RIVERA: I think you actually have to.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Yeah.
- LYSA RIVERA: In fact, you’re gonna have to for the next show, clearly.
[♪ Janelle Monae singing “Wondaland” ♪]
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland
♪ Take me back to Wondaland
♪ Me thinks she left her underpants
♪ This is your land
♪ This is my land
♪ We belong here
♪ Stay the night
♪ I am so inspired
♪ You touched my wires
♪ My supernova shining bright
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Thank you for joining. Our guest today was Dr. Lysa Rivera speaking about afrofuturism and science-fiction literature.
JORDAN BAKER: This show was recorded at the Spark Museum on Bay Street in the heart of Bellingham. Our producers are Susanne Blaze [sp?] and Katie Cunitzen [sp?]. Theme music, “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackilicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monae.
- REGINA BARBER DEGRAAFF: Join us next week at this time. If you like our show and would love to support us, please go to KMRE.org and click on the button “donate.”
[♪ Blackalicious rapping “Chemical Calisthenics” ♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around
♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them
♪ And they hit the ground