Ann Leckie’s "Ancillary Justice": A Critical Companion

ISBN-13: 9783031182600 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 92 str.

David M. Higgins

Opis

This book argues that Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.   

Recenzje

“I am a huge fan of Leckie’s IMPERIAL RADCH trilogy and I found Higgins’s Companion an excellent read … for its parallel introduction to critical postcolonial questions about the workings of empire in the twenty-first century.” (Veronica Hollinger, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 50, 2023)

Spis treści

1 Introduction 

Some Nobody Cook’s Daughter 

Ancillary Justice: An Overview 

Who Is Ann Leckie? 

Critical Perspectives 

The Problem of Empire 

References 

2 “She Was Probably Male”: Gender and Coloniality 

Gender, Sex, and Pronouns 

An Agender Perspective 

The Universal She? 

Pronouns and Coloniality 

References 

3 “Luxury Always Comes at Someone Else’s Expense”:Empire, Economics, and Addiction 

Imperial Allegories 

Buffer Zones and Homeland Security 

Garsedd: The Radchaai Vietnam 

Economic Addiction and Imperial Expansion 

Permanent Unevenness 

Imperialism and Addiction 

References

4 “You Are If I Say You Are”: Race, Citizenship, and Imperial Personhood 

Race and Empire 

Dinner Table Racism 

Cultural Racism 

Not Quite Human Enough 

Citizenship and Personhood 

Imperial Sovereignty 

The Politics of Recognition 

References 

5 “Save It for When It’ll Make a Difference”: Cynical Reason and Revolutionary Agency 

Cynical Reason 

Revolutionary Snap 

Currents of Agency 

Cascades of Affect 

Everything Makes a Difference 

Tipping Points and Dynamic Tensions 

Reactionary Snap 

Love and Truth 

References 

6 “Doing Something Is Always Better than Doing Nothing”: A Short Interview with Ann Leckie

O autorze

David M. Higgins is a Senior Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he is the Chair of the English Department at Inver Hills College in Minnesota, where he teaches classes on science fiction, graphic novels, American literature, and composition. He is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2021 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award.  

Blurb

"From racial capitalism and neo-imperialism to gender expression and revolutionary agency, Higgins writes with nuance and generosity to all potential readers about the real-world conditions that lie just under the surface of Leckie's far-future space opera. A big-hearted masterwork of accessible criticism, this is a book that you will want to share with students and colleagues alike."
—Rebekah Sheldon, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (2016)

"David Higgins gives us a masterful analysis of Ancillary Justice, the first novel in Leckie's trilogy, deftly tracing the book's major themes, together with its unusual use of language, and showing how the novel helps us think about the most urgent concerns of our present moment."
—Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University.

This book argues that Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice offers a devastating rebuke to the political, social, cultural, and economic injustices of American imperialism in the post 9/11 era. Following an introductory overview, the study offers four chapters that examine key themes central to the novel: gender, imperial economics, race, and revolutionary agency. Ancillary Justice’s exploration of these four themes, and the way it reveals how these issues are all fundamentally entangled with the problem of contemporary imperial power, warrants its status as a canonical work of science fiction for the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a brief interview with Leckie herself touching on each of the topics examined during the preceding chapters.   

David M. Higgins is a Senior Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he is the Chair of the English Department at Inver Hills College in Minnesota, where he teaches classes on science fiction, graphic novels, American literature, and composition. He is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2021 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award.