Genres of Empire: An Introduction

Genres of Empire:An Introduction Alyssa A. Hunziker (bio) and Mitch R. Murray (bio) It is now a cliché to note that contemporary literature and criticism have undergone a "genre turn" (Martin 2017; Leypoldt 2018; Tally 2017). Well-established authors of what critics deem distinctly literary fiction have taken up previously maligned popular genres like science fiction (SF), fantasy, westerns, postapocalypse, horror, superhero narratives, weird, romance, and so on. As Andrew Hoberek notes, literature at the end of the 2000s experienced "a thoroughgoing breakdown of the traditional barriers separating genre fiction from its more prestigious cousins" (2018, 66). Understandably, this development has allowed critics to make hay out of an emergent literary canon. These literary critical discussions frequently invoke well-established authors like Cormac McCarthy, China Miéville, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Emily St. John Mandel, Jennifer Egan, Karen Russell, and Colson Whitehead. Yet much of the critical interest in genre fiction, as this brief survey should indicate, coalesces around what turns out to be a rather small core of authors: mainly white, mainly male, mainly Anglo-American. This special double issue of College Literature embraces the excitement of genre fiction's newfound place of prominence in literature—particularly that enjoyed by the contemporary novel—while broadening this emergent canon and centering its engagements with [End Page 157] empire. Our impetus, more specifically, is that the genre turn often hits its explanatory limits when it comes to matters of empire, colonization, and settler colonialism. For us, the term "genres of empire" has two important meanings. First, it identifies literary generic registers that seem especially adept at grappling with the realities of empire in our present moment. Second, the phrase denotes genres, or modes, of imperial domination itself. Rather than reproducing sharp divisions across imperial, colonial, settler-colonial, and neo-imperial categories, our contributors point to a range of contemporary imperial formations. We use the term empire broadly to include current and former sites of colonial and settler-colonial occupation while also acknowledging transimperial systems, which have linked diverse territories and overlap multiple imperial regimes. While some contributors in this issue explore traditional sites of European colonialism and its vestiges, others highlight multinational capital, climate colonialism, colonial infrastructure, international law, and militarism as new or reinscribed "genres" of empire. Still others, like Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado and Kate Harlin, show how US- and UK-dominated publishing overdetermines literary genres in Anglophone contexts, subsuming multiple forms and national, cultural, and linguistic groups into ill-defined categories like Latinx or African literatures. Meanwhile, in the North American context—which many of our contributors treat—multiethnic, Indigenous, and African American genre fiction has gained increasing recognition by critics and publishers alike. We have seen an explosion of attempts by artists to articulate genre fiction's ability to grasp, critique, and posit alternatives to ongoing and emergent modes of settler-colonial and imperial domination. For instance, critics have noted the literary achievements of Marlon James, who famously set out to write the "African Game of Thrones," and C Pam Zhang, whose western novel How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020) straddles historical and speculative fiction to narrate historical and present convergences between Native American and Chinese American experiences with US settler-colonialism (Tolentino 2019; Harrison 2019; Hunziker, forthcoming). Charles Yu's fiction, which two of our contributors examine, is a standout case. His recent National Book Award-winning novel, Interior Chinatown (2020), is something of an encyclopedia of popular genres and mediums—from the police procedural to the kung fu movie—reworked to offer a critical account of their constitutive imperial histories. Prestige television like HBO's Watchmen (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020), [End Page 158] meanwhile, have given greater prominence to the role of empire and structural racism in the origins of their genres—superhero narratives, horror, and science fiction—while using those same genres to create critical accounts of contemporary racism and imperialism.1 Yet other generic forays are relegated to the still relatively undistinguished realms of YA fiction (Rebecca Roanhorse's Sixth World and Between Earth and Sky series and Cherie Dimaline's Marrow Thieves novels)2 and comics such as Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi's...