Darkies Never Dream: Race, Racism, and the Black Imagination in Science Fiction
John G. Russell is Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Faculty of Regional Studies at Gifu University, Japan, where from 2004 to 2006 he served as Director of the university’s International Student Center. His main research focuses on constructions of race, ethnicity, and gender in the United States and Japan; particular representations of blackness in mass culture, media, and scientific and speculative fiction; the genealogy of blackness in Japan, and the social perception and treatment of otherness. He is the author of two books in Japanese, Nihonjin no kokujin-kan (Japanese perceptions of blacks) (Shinhyωron, 1991) and Henken to sabetsu ga dono yω ni tsukurareru ka (How are prejudice and discrimination produced?) (Akashi Shoten, 1995). He has contributed chapters to Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, Racial Representations in Asia, and Reframing Diversity in the Anthropology of Japan and articles and reviews to numerous journals, including Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Cultural Anthropology, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Journal of Japanese Studies, Japanese Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, the Journal of Popular Culture, and MOSF Journal of Science Fiction. He has also contributed articles to the Japan Times, CounterPunch, Japan Quarterly, and Music Magazine. He is currently researching notions of passing and racial appropriation in the discourse of transracialism, the sexual fetishization of black males in Japanese pornography and penile enhancement advertisements, and racial representation in modern American and Japanese science fiction. He holds a degree in interdisciplinary studies (anthropology and East Asian studies) from Amherst College and a PhD in cultural anthropology from Harvard University.
John G. Russell; Darkies Never Dream: Race, Racism, and the Black Imagination in Science Fiction. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 November 2018; 18 (3): 255–278. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.18.3.0255
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