Karl Hardy, in his excellent essay on the historical-colonial roots of “utopia” and the tentative possibilities of its use in Indigenous politics, cites research that Thomas More’s Utopia may have been the first instance of the Roman word colonia in the English language. Hardy also points out that More’s utopians are colonists themselves, who conquer lands near their island when necessary, and kill or “civilize” others when they are deemed to be using the land improperly . Early fictional utopias, the Christian utopias of the pre-Enlightenment especially, were steeped in colonial tropes: an explorer must sail a trans-oceanic ship to arrive at utopia, will sometimes encounter savages, and these explorers ostensibly seek riches of the new frontier.The colonial roots of utopia are well-outlined by Hardy, and scholars of science fiction show the ways this history still informs utopian fiction, for example in the ways the language of the frontier is used to describe cyberspace, and the ways aliens are racialized in narratives of space travel. The dystopian works I study are also primarily works of Indigenous Futurism. Grace Dillon defines the genre as work that “enclose ‘reservation realisms’ in a fiction that sometimes fuses Indigenous sciences with the latest scientific theories available in public discourse, and sometimes undercuts the western limitations of science altogether” .
These works estrange sf itself because they are often situated in an apocalypse that has already occurred — the colonial apocalypse — but they project a hopeful,vertical agriculture decolonized future from these ruins. Thus they are concerned with how historical colonialism continues into the present and permeates North American societies and cultures, as they interact with each other. Indigenous science and sustainability are common themes for Indigenous futurisms, hence they receive special attention in Chapter 2. Spiritual and physical healing at an individual and societal level — emphasizing balance and harmony with the environment — is also a predominant theme, and is especially reflected here in Chapter 4. All of the texts of this study are rich grounds for both Settler Colonial and Utopian Studies readings, but they work together on more than just a literary level. While they may make strange bedfellows, both Utopian and Postcolonial Studies have Marxist roots. Reading texts through a utopian and postcolonial lens makes up for what I see as two blind spots in utopian studies. First, contemporary utopian theory is centered around Western concepts of human rights and, while it gestures toward intersectionality, has to date not adequately grappled with just how contingent utopia must be in a global context. It is a commonplace that classical Marxism itself famously does not fully account for colonialism in its understanding of class struggle, a fact that postcolonial theorists since Fanon have sought to remedy. We can see this reflected in the context of utopian studies in Levitas’ Utopia as Method: her conclusion briefly cites global inequality as a major problem and advocates for international redistribution of wealth, but both the philosophy on which she draws and her concrete ideas for utopia as method are dependent on familiarity with the language and ideas of democratic socialism, a language that often does not account for Europe and the United States’ accumulated wealth through colonial dispossession, and as such is applicable to non-Western societies in a limited way, one that does not fully account for cultural difference. This understanding helps account for the ways that even sf from the political left, such as the works I study in Chapter 1, has not fully engaged with the inextricability of colonialism from class and race struggle.
Eurocentrism leads to another problem of utopian studies I also attempt to address: if we wish to decolonize the concept of utopia, we must engage with the violence of colonial oppression, and the likelihood that true decolonization in the form of the overthrow of capitalism globally will be likely violent. Power holds many tools of violence to protect its wealth , and anticolonial nonviolent resistance is routinely met with violence. Postcolonial studies, especially Settler Colonial Theory, also helps address this problem. SCT, which takes Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as a founding text, grapples with the bare fact that “decolonization is always a violent event” , and that nonviolence is typically called for by the colonizer when the colonized rebel against violence and dispossession, revealing the colonizer’s belief that only the colonizer has the only right to violence. While the fact of violence leaves everyone uneasy, and is a difficult subject even in Postcolonial Studies, it cannot be ignored simply because it is not part of the relatively peaceful utopian vision of the future. One way I suggest working through this uneasiness is to separate “violence” as harm to people and “vandalism” as harm to property. Though typically seen as synonymous, vandalism tends to be the form of resistance that the authors I study here are most concerned with, one that harms capitalist systems rather than individuals. Indeed, many of the texts I study will suggest that “utopia as method” — as a contingent, emergent practice that imagines and works toward radical change — will sometimes and in some places involve violent resistance, questioning the dichotomy between utopia as “peaceful” and dystopia as inherently violent . All of these texts have implications for activism that I will explore, within the context of my own subjectivity as a White scholar of European descent. In this spirit I echo Wolfe’s conclusion in Traces of History: “It is not my place to instruct colonized people on how to resist their condition, let alone to impersonate their agency … I have tried to offer an analysis, in the hope that it may prove useful” — useful to scholars who consider themselves activists and allies of colonized peoples, and who must grapple with these unsettling questions. In adding Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies and discussions of Indigenous Science to the mix in some chapters, especially Chapters 2 and 4 dealing with agricultural sciences and bio-piracy, respectively, I historicize the ways that colonization used/uses Western science and technology — to further utopian projects of colonization and globalization, and in doing so I take up the challenge postcolonial STS makes in decentering Western science and technology.
STS theorists observe the slippage between science fiction and science fact; some, like Colin Milburn, go so far as to suggest that science fiction is a sort of intellectual workbench of science . However, Western science fiction and the real-world projects which it reveals and reflects upon do not have a monopoly on techno-optimism. Instead, the texts I study puttechno-optimism to work in an anticolonial way, by subverting not-yet-existing Western technologies and by imagining indigenous technological innovations. The contention that postcolonial sf uses technology and/or utopian ideas more broadly as means of anticolonial subversion is not new. However, in my view, the subfield of Postcolonial SFS has an unfortunate tendency to situate colonialism in the past that can be corrected through a concerted engagement with Settler Colonialism. Patricia Kerslake, for example, in her work Science Fiction and Empire, not only considers colonialism a historical event but suggests that sf’s concerns with empire are not Western at all, but rather “the tendency we all share” to dominance and oppression. Ralph Pordzik, another problematic example,vertical farming aeroponics looks productively at third world sf in his book, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures. However, as Eric Smith notes, he subsumes his study in multiculturalism to the point of diminishing productive differences between different postcolonial geographies. Thus, an SCT-based study of dystopian speculative fiction and works of Indigenous Futurism can help correct this oversight and bring the discussion into our contemporary moment of increasing environmental instability and socio-economic upheaval. This study rethinks utopia against the anti-utopian projects of the settler colonizer, projects that began centuries ago and continue to this day. Some of these projects include: colonial attempts to increase the efficiency of land through new farming technologies, such as bioengineering; the use of genetics research on Indigenous peoples to further medical advancements that will not be accessible to research subjects; and using technologies of surveillance and security to maintain the borders of the settler colonial utopia. I discuss these and more in the following chapter outline, but first I must note that all of these technologies are forms of colonial violence in themselves, and are also protected with the use of violent and deadly technologies. Technologies of colonial violence loom large over the works I study, and also loom over every chapter.Without a doubt, fumigation has been one of the most controversial aspects of the process of eradicating illegal crops in Colombia. The toxicity of the herbicides used and the importance that fumigation acquired in the international strategy of the United States against drugs, have caused this subject to become an essentially polemical one.
The present article takes an historical look at the matter and describes and explains the fumigation policy imposed by the US on Colombia as part of a drug diplomacy which has characterized relations between the two countries over the past twenty-five years. Before beginning this chronology, however, it would be worthwhile to take a look at the basis for the US policy in this regard. Fumigation with herbicides corresponds to a rationale based on five premises: An implicit refusal to accept the notion that every demand produces a supply. When it come to repression, therefore, the emphasis is placed on growing, producing, processing, transporting and trading in drugs, rather than on the centers where drugs are consumed or on the places where there is the greatest margin of profit for the international illegal trade in drugs.It is assumed that, in terms of results and resources, strong repressive measures taken at the centers which provide drugs constitute the most effective way of combating the drug trade. It is assumed that punitive strategies designed and executed by those states in which the demand exists, and in those where the supply has originated, are pertinent when it comes to attacking a highly lucrative illegal trade that arises and evolves in a non-state situation and which is in the hands of powerful groups within society. It is assumed that, for the consumer countries, a greater and more effective eradication of illegal crops will lead to three results: fewer stimulants of this kind will be available on the market, they will be more highly priced, and they will be less pure. As a consequence of this triple assumption, it is supposed that there will be a decrease in urban criminality associated with drug dealing and a decrease in consumption. It is assumed that greater and more efficient eradication of illegal crops in the producing countries will lead, among other things, to a reduction in the value of illegal crops in the zones of production, a weakening of the drug traffickers’ power, a containing of violence generated by drug traffic affecting the more vulnerable sections of the population linked to these illegal plantations, and a decrease in the environmental damage caused by illegal plantations in soil which is fragile and extremely valuable. During the administration of President Julio César Turbay Ayala , Washington began putting pressure on the Colombian government to use chemicals for eradicating marijuana crops, especially in La Guajira on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. By 1978, Colombia had become the number one producer and exporter of marijuana to the United States. Of the 10,000 tons introduced into the US during that year, between 60 and 65 percent was supplied by Colombian traffickers. At the time it was estimated that Colombia had between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares planted with marijuana.During the administration of President Jimmy Carter , interdiction anderadication were the two keynotes governing international anti-drug policy. The attempt to manually eradicate marijuana plantations was no longer seen by Washington as sufficient. Congress and the White House began to agree that herbicides should be used to put an end to plantations not only of marijuana but also of poppies . In Latin America, herbicides had already been used in Mexico and in Jamaica. In the mid-seventies, Operación Condor in Mexico attempted to destroy marijuana plantations and was presented as a resounding success in the fight against drugs.