Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction By Mark Jerng

Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction  By Mark Jerng

Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?

In Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction, I argue that far from just being a mode of thought predicated on its operations of classification and categorization, race is very much a species of speculative thought - the ways we imagine what could or might happen.The book uses an archive of popular fictions from the late nineteenth century to the present, with each main part devoted to a specific sub-genre: yellow peril genres; plantation romance; sword and sorcery; and alternate history. It uses the capacity of genre to project coherent, inhabitable, fictional worlds in order to rethink race as not just an object of perception but as a formal element in the construction of our worlds of reference. In this way, the book develops a new analytic approach to the relationship between literary and racial formation based in theorizations of genre, narratology, and racial salience. It builds a theory of “racial worldmaking,” which is my phrase for narrative and interpretive strategies that shape how readers notice race so as to build, anticipate, and organize the world.

 

What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?

It was teaching Multi-Ethnic Literature at UC Davis and having deeply contested arguments both with students and between students themselves about whether or not a given text was about race. At the time, I thought it very strange that people could not agree on whether a certain episode in a text was about race or not. And so I thought there was a great deal to be said about this "aboutness." How do we determine when something is about race and when something is not about race? That was the question that started my inquiry into narrative strategy and then, further on down the line, the mechanisms of genre.

 

If you could pair your book with one other text, what would you recommend? Why?

Samuel Delany's science fiction and criticism are the foundation for the project - both in terms of how he writes and how he writes about science fiction. So I would pair this book with a collection of non-fiction essays that he wrote titled "Starboard Wine."

Racial Worldmaking came out in November from Fordham University Press. You can find it here.