Science fiction at the end of the settler Americas: Caleb Benjamin Green Delorme, The Initial Frontier: Science Fiction Between Argentina and the United States, PhD dissertation Rutgers University, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Science fiction at the end of the settler Americas: Caleb Benjamin Green Delorme, The Initial Frontier: Science Fiction Between Argentina and the United States, PhD dissertation Rutgers University, 2024

19Nov24

Abstract: This dissertation describes how the specific settler-colonial histories of the United States and Argentina led to similar types of counter-colonial science fiction taking shape in both countries. In Argentina, as opposed to parts of Latin America where ideas of racial mestizaje are more dominant, colonial discourse has exalted a “pure” whiteness that would “civilize” the frontier by murdering indigenous people outright. This idea has much in common with genocidal notions of Manifest Destiny in the United States. The dismal commonality of these two colonial discourses led, in turn, to both countries appropriating the style of European proto-science fiction — which tended to allegorize and rearrange the key terms of colonial discourse — in parallel ways. While the majority of this science fiction tended to support the settler-colonial ideology of Argentina and the U.S., there were also authors in both countries that used the genre to subvert the frontier ideology of their respective nations. The focus of my analysis is the latter, more subversive type of writing. In describing the shape this science fiction took in Argentina and the U.S., I hope to contribute to documenting the prehistory of the anticolonial and antiracist science fiction that has risen to prominence since the 1990s, as well as to highlight how certain formal features of the genre become salient in geographically specific colonial contexts.

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