Cole Jack’s Reviews > Race in American Science Fiction > Status Update

Lavender keeps talking about race and illness as though they are separate, unrelated concepts. I don't understand why he doesn't talk about the intersections in these identities--that there are disabled people of color in Butler's "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" and these characters can be analyzed through a DS and race studies perspective.

The chapter "Ailments of Race" has numerous instances of Prof. Lavender using disability as a metaphor for race and racism, particularly in his discussion of Butler's "The Evening and the Morning and the Night." He argues that I had hoped this tendency wouldn't make its way into another piece of his writing, but it has and it remains frustrating for me as someone who studies race and disability.

Lavender refers to the Wachowski directors as the "Wachowski brothers" even though Lana Wachowski's transition was already public knowledge in 2009/10--likely while either Lavender or his editors were in final edits for this monograph. I can excuse it as slipping through the cracks, but his use of The Matrix for an aside about religion--that doesn't make sense in context of his argument--just adds to my frustration.

Rescinding--partially--my previous comment because Lavender has started to include scholars working on African American literature and ethnic studies in this chapter.

Lavender's nearly exclusive use of science fiction scholars in the first two chapters, even though his analysis is clearly echoing conversations that have long existed in other fields, seems a bit questionable to me. For example, when talking about biases in the writing of history I'm surprised he didn't reference Trouillot's Silencing the Past or other texts that could have strengthened his argument.

"Invisible Man is afrofuturist, but is Invisible Man science fiction? My answer is no...some kind of recognized science fictional textual apparatus is necessary for a work or works to be called sf." I disagree. Lavender is entrenched in traditional definitions of what can/cannot be considered sf that doesn't resonate with my own approach, despite how interesting his argument is while doing so.

Eric Rabkin and Robert Scholes: "the presence of unhuman races, aliens, and robots, certainly makes the differences between human races seem appropriately trivial, and one of the achievements of science fiction had been its emphasis on just this feature of human existence." LOL. Thank you, Prof. Lavender for critiquing this statement.