Speaker/Performer: Baryon Posadas - Assistant Professor of Asian Languages & Literatures, University of Minnesota
It should no longer be at all controversial to begin with the premise that the formation of the genre of science fiction is intimately intertwined with the history of empire. However, few of the existing analyses on the subject address the specific case of Japan, despite the fact that the examination of Japanese science fiction provides a particularly effective prism for illuminating these issues as a consequence of its historical position as the only non-Western colonial empire with a science fiction tradition that emerged out of its history of imperial conquest while at once fetishized through all manner of orientalist representations in Western SF. I argue that this particular historical position that Japanese science fiction occupies speaks to the politics embedded in the complex interplay of colonial discourse and its inversion in the genre’s development.
More information: https://ceas.yale.edu/events/colonial-cognitive-estrangement-politics-satirical-reversal-japanese-science-fiction