Tumbled Thoughts On American Muslim Life

Old Time Sci-Fi

"By ‘the emergence of science fiction,’ I mean the coalescence of a set of generic expectations into a recognizable condition of production and reception that enables both writers and readers to approach individual works as examples of a literary kind that in the 1920s and after came to be named science fiction. This process involves a historical shift in the system of recognizable literary genres, the emergence of a set of conventions and expectations that presented itself as a market niche, on the one hand (as the publishing entrepreneur Hugo Gernsback, the man most responsible for promulgating the term ‘science fiction,’ recognized), and as a creative possibility, on the other (as Verne, Wells, Conan Doyle, London, Burroughs, and many others recognized in the half-century before Gernsback launched his first ‘scientification’ magazine). During a seventy-year period beginning around 1870 and ending with the outbreak of the Second World War, a steadily increasing number of texts prominently featured characteristics of science fiction, and a fairly coherent, long-term change in form accompanied this rising volume … [Paul] Kincaid argues that science fiction, or any other literary genre, is best understood as a group of objects that bear a ‘family resemblance’ to one another rather than sharing some set of essential, defining characteristics. He borrows the notion of family resemblance from Wittgenstein, whose example is the Philosophical Investigations is the term ‘sport.’ Wittgenstein shows that we can point to any number of activities that we consider to be sports, but we cannot point to any essential feature that all sports share. Applying Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance to science fiction, Kincaid concludes that ‘science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things-a future setting, a marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, here more overt, here more subtle-which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations’*."

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More from John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Again, I am pushed to consider Rieder’s methodology of inquery to look at the Muslim issue of authenticity as it relates to its American expression.

* Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 416-17.

"I am not trying to argue that colonialism is science fiction’s hidden truth. I want to show that it is part of the genre’s texture, a persistent component of its displaced references to history, its engagement in ideological production, and its construction of the possible and the imaginable."

— From John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Rieder’s last sentence here speaks volumes to me not only in terms of imperial colonialism but more directly to the psyche of the American Muslim, who has been a similar “victim” [by victim here I mean those who have been coerced as well as self-inflicted colonialism] of “overseas Islam”, in effect, equally colonizing him or her and constructing the very possibilities of their Islam with no regard to how they might imagine Islam in that part of the world.