Darija Medić Web and Software Programmer and Digital Art Project Coordinator at DiploFoundation
A policy of science fiction: Behind the scenes of race and technology First published on DiploFoundation Blog, 10 June ‘Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.’ Greg Tate (US writer, musician, and founding member of the Black Rock Coalition) Situated writing and reading: a few caveats This text is a particular policy reading of media and science fiction narrative, to open conceptual pathways for accessing widespread issues of systemic repression in how they relate to the history of technology, policy and intersectional identity. With special focus on examples from Afrofuturist popular culture, it will provide implications that the heritage of colonialism brings to spaces of regulation, invisible to many stakeholders, while hypervisible to others. There are a few significant caveats for gracefully landing into this discussion. Firstly, Afrofuturism as a genre of science fiction was developed in an emancipatory effort to subvert the spectatorship of the Western white gaze. This text paradoxically reverts both the readership and the authorship to a predominantly white one: as the author I am a cisgender woman, locating myself in the Balkans, a conflict region in the geopolitical periphery of Western organisation of power. The intended readership of this is one embedded in policy and therefore conventionally Western and white, being that large international policy organizations have main headquarters in Western Europe and the USA. The purpose is not to appropriate, but to acknowledge the value Afrofuturism brings to a confrontation with sociopolitical and economic issues of race and technology that are difficult to see from the default, normed lens of those who are not systemically oppressed in these terms. It particularly focuses on pertaining tropes of constituting blackness, crucial for rethinking the conditions in which policy processes as agents of global norming arise. This text is not intended as a reflection on the emancipatory extent of the ideas presented in the examples that will be explored. Likewise, it doesn’t take part in discussions related to possible repressive applications of the genre in serving as an escapist modality of hope, while pacifying its storytellers and listeners to think of change in potentiality and fantasy. It is also not analysing
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