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This book argues that science fiction has been a key participant, along with anthropology and literary theory, in the interdisciplinary debates over "culture" and narrative form from the modernist period to the present. Both science fiction and the anthropological ethnography, in their modernist forms and post-modern/postcolonial reinventions, are intertwined technologies for constructing "culture" and difference through narrative worldbuilding. This book traces the ways SF authors -- including Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler, as well as Indigenous futurists Craig Strete, Celu Amberstone, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cherie Dimaline -- have deployed, interrogated and revised these models of "culture," representation and power to imagine new futures.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Science Fiction, Anthropology and the Problem of Culture.- Chapter 2: Aliens, Anthropologists, and American Indians: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Modernist Anthropology and the Idea of Culture.- Chapter 3: Well-Wrought Cultures and Carrier Bags: Forms of Culture in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home.- Chapter 4: Captivity, Conversion, Culture: Octavia E. Butler's Genre-tic Engineering of Ethnography and Science Fiction in the Xenogenesis Trilogy.- Chapter 5: Resisting Culture: Culture and/as Sovereignty in Indigenous Futurisms.- Chapter 6: Coda: Culture's Futures.
About the author
Eric Aronoff is an Associate Professor of Humanities in the Residential College of Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, USA. His areas of expertise are modernist American literature and criticism, anthropology and literature, and theories of culture, as well as science fiction. Eric also has strong research interests in literature and the environment. His work has appeared in journals such as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Genre and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Eric’s first book, Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies and the Problem of Culture was published in 2013.
