Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

by Jordan S. Carroll

“race shapes genre” because it “composes expectations for what the world might look like and activates rules for knowing the world.”42 When the alt-right uses science fiction as a tool to change metapolitics, they intervene in the racialized worldview that constitutes the grounds for determining what is politically or socially possible.

The alt-right asserts ownership over science fiction because they think white people maintain a monopoly on modal imagination. Nonwhite people, they suggest, dwell in a state of modal impoverishment, cut off from possibility.

We see the alt-right trying to police the boundaries of science fiction every time they protest when a person of color is cast in a genre film. It is not simply that the alt-right hates diversity in cinema: they’re offended by the idea that nonwhite people might exist in other possible worlds.

Whereas strong science fiction asks us to confront the possibility of a fundamental break with the existent, Faustian science fiction consoles its fascist fans by positing the essential continuity of blood and time.