Overview

When does racial description become racism? Critical race studies has not come up with good answers to this question because it has overemphasized the visuality of race. According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named ""racial worldmaking"" because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy. Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

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In a book that pays equal attention to the protocols and history of genre reading and to contemporary critical theories of race, Mark Jerng shows how techniques of worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy and attention to setting as site of literary innovation define textual and interpretive strategies for producing race at levels other than biological differences or overtly racialized characters or authors, shifting the analysis of race and racism away from visual epistemology to allow them to be understood as embedded in fictional worlds. -- -Thomas Foster author of The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory Racial Worldmaking meets the irresistible demand for scholarship that recognizes the central role of perceiving and speculating about race in American literature and culture. By situating race as a structuring principle within legal doctrines, literary traditions, and economic philosophies, Jerng interrogates the fictions that buttress dominant racial ideologies and calls attention to the imaginative work performed by thinkers who take racism seriously. Racial Worldmaking moves beyond disciplinary conventions to apply lessons learned from critical race theories and advance vital lines of inquiry inaugurated by Black and Asian American intellectuals. -- -andre carrington author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

Author Information

Mark C. Jerng is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging.

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