PHOTOS: Science Fiction & Multiraciality event

On December 14th, 2013, Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) hosted Science Fiction and Multiraciality: From Octavia Butler to Harry Potter at the Brooklyn Historical Society. The event featured interactive and multimedia presentations by Eric Hamako, social justice educator from Smith College, and a collective visionary fiction storytelling workshop by Walidah Imarisha, activist, poet, professor and Co-Editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. The program was phenomenally instructive and successful, and we experienced a big turnout and deep engagement, despite a last minute snowstorm in New York.

CBBG public programs provide unique opportunities for people to critically engage with concepts, issues, and histories related to mixed-race identity, racialization and racism. For this event, we attempted to open a portal to these complex, intersectional topics impacting people of color in the US through science fiction, fantasy, and imagination. The event emphasized visionary fiction as a channel to imagine more inclusive and equitable futures, and created space to reflect on, analyze, and critique existing sci-fi media narratives in order to expose stereotypes about mixed-race communities.

At the beginning of the event, Lauren Bird, Spokesperson from the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) introduced the organization, and talked about harnessing the imaginative power of Harry Potter fandom, and connecting science fiction to social justice mobilization. She also handed out stickers and talked about the HPA’s new Hunger Games video and campaign: Odds in Our Favor. You can see the campaign video here.

Eric Hamako then presented a fantastic visual and interactive talk, Harry Potter and the Mistaken Myth of the Mixed-Race Messiah, followed by an in-depth Q&A session. He provided illustrations of the racial anxieties prevalent in mainstream discourse today. He also talked about the anxieties, fears, archetypes, and assumptions assigned to one of the most popular mixed-race celebrities and leaders in the US: President Obama. Eric then contextualized some manifestations of racial anxieties as they are made apparent through science fiction films, books, and most prominently, through the Harry Potter books and films. He explained that stereotypes about mixed-race people manifest primarily through two competing narratives, one of “hybrid degeneracy” and another of “hybrid vigor.” In these narratives, mixed-race heroes and heroines are either depicted as the villainous problems that have to be neutralized, or alternately as the valiant solutions that have the best of both worlds. Audience members were thoroughly engaged with the images that Eric shared, and they lifted up several corollary examples from other science fiction stories, films, and narratives.

One of the main takeaways from Eric’s presentation was the realization that science fiction often does not interrogate or oppose dominant racist or white supremacist ideologies, but rather succeeds in cloaking and masking racist undertones or racial anxieties through mainstream sci-fi tropes, “diversity” casting, and placement of ethnically ambiguous characters in lead roles. Audience members were encouraged to distinguish between science fiction that supports the stereotyping of mixed-race communities and plays heavily into the myth of postracialism, and visionary fiction that attempts to humanize people of color and draw attention to efforts that historicize and protest inequities and injustices.

Eric’s talk set the stage beautifully for Walidah Imarisha’s presentation on visionary fiction. Walidah began by talking about Octavia Butler’s legacy, and contextualizing the role of visionary fiction ‘praxis’ whereby people organizing for better futures imagine, practice, and implement the values of visionary fiction. Walidah explained that working for a world without poverty, hunger, homelessness, police brutality, deportations, and more, required organizers and activists to envision an alternate future -- which is essentially science and visionary fiction in praxis. She described core principle frameworks for visionary fiction, and then examples of authors and books that successfully demonstrated world-building that reflected visionary fiction. She also shared a trailer for an upcoming Kenyan sci-fi TV series, Usoni, which tells the story of re-centering Africa in the dominant narrative as a place of development, urbanization, light and sunshine (as opposed to the “dark and primitive continent”). In Usoni, we saw a story where the sun has been blotted out from the Northern Hemisphere and only shines in Africa, causing rapid growth and globalization to occur there, while all of Europe is plunged into darkness and European migrants flee to the Global South to survive.

Walidah then led audience members to break out into seven small groups for a visionary fiction storytelling exercise. Audience members had already selected seats based on twelve issue areas when they arrived at the event – the issues were taped to the chairs and included: multiraciality, war on drugs, reproductive justice, war, globalization, colonialism, prisons, immigration, racial profiling, language access, sovereignity/tribal rights. Walidah facilitated an exercise that asked participants to envision a fictional story based on the issue area selected by the group. She also encouraged them to integrate themes from Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations, such as race and ethnicity, food and celebration, cultural preservation, laws and mores. Folks spent thirty minutes brainstorming, storyboarding, and dreaming together, and came up with incredible narratives that reflected the principles of visionary fiction. All seven of the groups created (from scratch!) protagonists, narrative arcs with conflicts and climaxes, world-building and fictional environments that reflected real oppressions and structural problems, while also incorporating moments of struggle and activism.

Participants thoroughly enjoyed the presentations and collective visionary fiction storytelling workshop. CBBG was delighted to host this exploratory and creative conversation through our program, and after the workshop, our team heard feedback from attendees along these lines -

“My friends can't stop talking about this event, and neither can I! We're shifting the focus of our book club at least temporarily to feed our POC sci-fi love! So thank you again for that. Very well done!”

"I felt really inspired by this amazing event and was very productive this weekend with my own sci-fi writing thanks to the brainstorming and collaboration that happened in the small groups.”

“Eric Hamako’s presentation was very well thought-out, analytical, and reflective. He made a very good point about the ways in which mixed-race people are depicted in films, something I hadn’t thought about before.”

Special thanks to our event co-sponsors, the Harry Potter Alliance and MixedRaceStudies.org.

All photos by Willie Davis for Brooklyn Historical Society, 2013.