In June of 2007, roughly a year and a half after the unexpected death of Octavia Butler, Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention held annually in Wisconsin, had a panel discussion on Genre Tokenism: The New Octavia Butler. Thanks to the tenacity of a few Bloggers, the thoughts that were informally exchanged that morning have been recorded on the Feminist Science Fiction wiki (wiki.feministsf.net) and discussed at length across a special corner of the web. In part a tribute to a revered foremother, and in part a bitter commentary on the lasting racial and gender blinders in the fields of speculative fiction, a group of respected authors (their numbers include K. Tempest Bradford, and Nisi Shawl, among others) who plow some aspect of the speculative fiction field and happen to be women of color, reflected on being called the “New” Octavia Butler, and what that might mean. While of course rejecting the question as tokenism, several of the panelists agreed that the writer most likely to be attached to that label is Nalo Hopkinson, because she has been relatively prolific as a novelist. When the blogger Oyceter picked up on this discussion (http://oyceter.livejournal.com/605061.html), it sparked a lively conversation in which, again Nalo Hopkinson’s name was again mentioned prominently. Hopkinson herself chimed in: “I find that when white people in SF talk about this stuff, money of them assume that the only perceptivle difference between a POC writer and a non-POC one is skin color. But that’s like assuming that a hearing person won’t regnise a tune being played if s/he can’t see the band. The makers of culture, language, and experience ring as loudly as any visual marker – which is to say, they’re so fluid that you can’t make any hard and fast assumptions.”
Hopkinson’s stateswomanly response to this issue seems to me to acknowledge two plain facts: In turns of similarity, no careful reader of Butler’s clean, direct prose would mistake her work for Hopkinson’s often flamboyant, Caribbean inflected prose, just as the introspective, heroic women who occupy center stage in Butler’s novel bare little similarity to the brash women Hopkinson is often at home with. Yet both of them have, with some been able to insert a black, female voice into the overwhelmingly white boys club that has usually been American SF. And of course, both of them question the hell out of standard definitions of race and sex.
more to come
