Racial Worldmaking

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.---—andré carrington, author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

This book is an important contribution to critical race studies within sf and I recommend it to any reader of SFS interested in race... It is in his careful analysis of the mechanisms of that worldbuilding as they pertain to race that Jerng truly offers us something novel... It is probably those who do not spend as much time thinking about worldbuilding who will find Jerng’s study most revelatory. We make these worlds. We could make them differently.---Science Fiction Studies

Racial Worldmaking exhibits strong, fluid writing that is academic by design and presentation yet accessible to a wide readership.---Choice