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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
I'm always trying to encourage students to look at things historically and be like, there's so much more here than you might have thought at first. The more we dig at historical detail, the more we discover that history is always richer and more complicated, more endlessly verdant, in its complexity than we can ever grasp.
Jordan S. Carroll:White nationalists suggest that white people and especially white men, aren't going to become who they are unless they have a high-tech fascist utopia in their eyes to help them realize this.
David M. Higgins:Okay. So hello. My name is David M. Higgins. A little bit about me to kick off.
David M. Higgins:I'm an associate professor and chair at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University worldwide, where, I'm in the humanities and communication department. I'm also a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. I'm an author. My, book is called Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt Victimhood. And my research examines how reactionary groups use science fiction in their construction of victimhood identity.
David M. Higgins:So I'm here today with Jordan S Carroll who is the author of two books Reading the Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature, and the book that we'll be talking about today, Science Fiction and the Alt Right. Jordan received his PhD in English literature from UC Davis. He was awarded the David g Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. And his first book, Reading the Obscene, won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. Jordan's writing has appeared in American literature, post 45, twentieth century literature, and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts as well as in The Nation.
David M. Higgins:He works as a writer and educator in the Pacific Northwest. So, Jordan, thanks so much. It's great to be here to do an interview with you for University of Minnesota Press. How are you?
Jordan S. Carroll:Thanks for being here. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to this.
David M. Higgins:Awesome. Well, so let's dig right in with speculative whiteness. So you describe speculative whiteness as the idea that white men are the future, and in your book you suggest that speculative whiteness continues to be a pervasive idea in many far right circles. To begin, can you just tell us a little bit more about what you mean by speculative whiteness? Give us some background on this key idea that you explore in the book.
Jordan S. Carroll:Sure. Speculative whiteness is a racist ideology that holds that only white men are capable of imagining and ultimately existing in the future. So in the project, I I look at a number of different ways that this has played out in the history of science fiction, but also in the history of white nationalism. So, for example, there is a long tradition of thinking of white men as somehow being uniquely rational planners for the future. There are all these sort of racist myths that the Europeans lived in the cold, and so they provided for the next winter, and that somehow caused them to evolve a kind of future orientation.
Jordan S. Carroll:Another aspect of speculative whiteness though is this fascist belief that white men are capable of intuitive or imaginative leaps into an unforeseen future. So there's a dimension of speculation or gambling to this as well, that white men are uniquely suited for entrepreneurial risk, essentially. And I trace this through a variety of different places. But what I find is that this belief system appears among white nationalists, but it also appears quite a bit in the history of science fiction and science fiction fandom as well.
David M. Higgins:Got it. So where do you see this? Can you tell us some about where you see this in the history of science fiction fandom? I mean, I know that from a kind of contemporary perspective, I think that the overwhelming sense of science fiction fandom is that it's very left leaning, very liberal, very progressive. This is why Ron DeSantis is trying to, you you know, attack woke Disney and all that.
David M. Higgins:So at least within a lot of science fiction communities, I guess this is part of things a lot of different science fiction communities, right? Like, where where do you see those fandoms, right, that that you talk about in the book?
Jordan S. Carroll:I think you're right. Now we think of science fiction as Octavia Butler and Ursula k Le Guin, but I think that is a hard won struggle for the definition of science fiction. If we look to the past, there have been a number of instances where fascists and white nationalists emerged out of science fiction fandom. For example, the first neo Nazi was a man named James h Madel who got his start in science fiction fandom. He wrote into a science fiction magazine to try to recruit.
Jordan S. Carroll:And when he presented his vision for the future, he very clearly drawed on imagery from classic science fiction. So he imagined that after white people basically committed a global genocide, they would build a new world that he called the New Atlantis, and they would evolve into these kind of posthuman mutants eventually that would ultimately colonize the stars. And so he very much drew on a long tradition in science fiction of imagining a superior race, but also imagining space colonization as an act of settler colonialism. One of the things that I suggest in this book is that we can't simply think of people like James h Madall as outside agitators who are coming in and messing up science fiction, but rather we have to think of a kind of fascist tendency within the genre that's always in competition with the more progressive or left leaning tendencies within the genre.
David M. Higgins:You mentioned in your book, the sad puppies and the rabid puppies and all of that. So would you say that you continue to see those tendencies today? I guess there are fan cultures that are reactionary speculative fiction fan cultures, and you point towards some of those today. Do you think that they're becoming marginalized within the sort of fan communities? Or we're we're in a moment where there's a lot of different kinds of community spaces that are occurring that are not in relationship to one another.
David M. Higgins:How big are right wing speculative fan communities in your estimation?
Jordan S. Carroll:I think that, you know, the example of the Hugo Awards controversy where a bunch of right wing fans tried to to sweep the awards is is indicative of the size of some of these groups. On one hand, it was big enough that due in part to the way that voting works for the Hugo Awards, they were able to get a lot of nominations, but they weren't able to ultimately succeed in winning all the awards. And so it it goes to show that these right wing groups, although significant and very much real, I don't know if they're the dominant group in science fiction in the present. But, I mean, we see, like, whenever there is, you know, a trailer, for Star Wars with a black stormtrooper or something like that, there's always this extremely online group of right wing fans who are gonna object to the idea that people of color have a future, or that the future might not be exclusively white.
David M. Higgins:So in terms of intellectual genealogy, right, like, I I see what you mean about early science fiction fandom, certain early science fiction fans or contemporary science fiction fans like Richard Spencer, right, like using science fiction in the way that they are thinking about things. Would you say that you think in terms of the sort of intellectual genealogy of white supremacy that science fiction is implicated, is incidental? Like, what's the role historically, right, between science fiction and, you know, white nationalist, white identitarian, white supremacist sort of forms of thinking?
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, it seems like there are two strands maybe to the book that that are related and overlapping. One is speculation, which I think is very much has a history of being bound up in white supremacy. And the other, I think, is science fiction. I think that we see science fiction coming up again and again in the history of white nationalism when, you know, as you point out, Richard Spencer is a huge fan in particular of science fiction film.
Jordan S. Carroll:He also loves Frank Herbert's Dune. And a lot of his podcasts are not devoted to politics in general, but rather these tendentious readings of science fiction texts in order to unearth white nationalist readings. And so there, you know, there are a couple ways of reading that. One is that he's just simply projecting onto science fiction. But the other, I think, is that he's seeing something that's really there.
Jordan S. Carroll:Often, the the alt right and white nationalists are reading critiques of fascism and then leaving off the part where it negates fascism. So often these texts are sort of, like, about locating a moment of fascist enjoyment in the science fiction field. Like, we see Dune is very much a book about the ways that in in a certain, you know, the Campbell era of science fiction, there was this vision of the heroic Superman. And it's very much about looking at the the dangers of that and where it can go awry. But what somebody like Spencer does is they see, oh, here is the god emperor.
Jordan S. Carroll:Here is the heroic Superman, and then they leave off that moment of, well, wait. Maybe we should think about this. Maybe we should critique this. It's the same thing with Starship Troopers, like the Verhoeven version, Watchmen. They see the kind of critique of fascism internal to science fiction, and then they ignore the critical dimension to it or the negative dimension that says, no.
Jordan S. Carroll:We have to watch for this and make sure that it doesn't take further root. But at the same time, it was there in the first place. Like, people like Frank Herbert or Alan Moore had a reason to worry about these tendencies. We see this, for example, Norman Spinrad's wonderful book, The Iron Dream, was, imagining the science fiction that Adolf Hitler would have wrote in an alternate world. And a lot of it is a send up of these kind of violent reactionary tendencies within science fiction.
Jordan S. Carroll:But when it came out, white nationalists wrote back and said, oh, this is great. And so we can kind of see that this is a tendency that that runs throughout science fiction even if it's been marginalized in more recent years.
David M. Higgins:Yeah. You make me think about, you know, after Grant Morrison's run on X Men, there was a whole Magneto is right, movement, which I think is the sort of, like, missing the irony of the way that that was occurring in the comics during that time. You know, Magneto being another one of these pop cultural figures of I'm oppressed, but I'm going to become the supreme, the Pariah elite, right? You know, I'm better than the, puny humans who are oppressing me, right? You know, I was thinking about the X Men a lot actually, when I was reading, your description.
David M. Higgins:The tension between the sort of X Men and the brotherhood under under Magneto seems to be a kind of popular representation of those tensions.
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, I think that's that's an interesting observation. Because in the book, I think I touched briefly on the way that that Jason Reza Giorgiani kind of looks at X Men and imagines himself in the position of that superhero elite or imagines people like him in that position. But then on the other hand, you have people like Richard Spencer who read it in a very antisemitic way and highlight the ethnic and religious background of the creators of comic books like X Men to suggest that they're somehow subversive. Like, their message of tolerance and inclusion is, in people like his mind, a kind of way of attacking the white race.
David M. Higgins:So that covers your second part, right, talking about the science fiction side. What's the speculation part of, of speculative whiteness, in your view? You mentioned just a moment ago, you said there's something central about speculation to white supremacy. What what do you mean by that?
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, I think that this is true in two ways. One is that as long as white supremacy and modernity have been valued or have been upheld together, we've seen attempts to suggest that white men are the future, that white men are future oriented. One of the things that as I worked on this that I discovered was you could take this idea further and further and further into the past. There are antebellum, anti abolitionists, and social Darwinists making this case.
Jordan S. Carroll:And there are enlightenment era thinkers from the eighteenth century who are also suggesting that Europeans are uniquely suited towards scientific innovations, or thinking about the future. So that's one aspect. Another is though that whiteness itself is in some sense speculative in the eyes of fascists. They believe that whiteness is not a possession. It's not something that's actual that already exists right now.
Jordan S. Carroll:Instead, they think that whiteness is promissory, that there is this potential to whiteness that only exists in the future, and it has to to be realized at some point in the future. White nationalists suggest that white people, and especially white men, aren't going to become who they are unless they have a high-tech fascist utopia in their eyes to help them realize this. And so people like Richard Spencer will will suggest that white men could be astronauts out exploring the cosmos right now. But because of multicultural society or multiracial society, they're stuck here on Earth. And so there's this idea that whiteness doesn't exist in the here and now.
Jordan S. Carroll:It's something that's always beyond the present, something that is a potential, something that is yet to be realized and requires an ethnostate or a white imperium to fulfill.
David M. Higgins:Yeah. That's great. You're kind of going right into sort of my train of thinking, this sort of notion of these sort of white masculine figures being oppressed or held back from their potential. Right? I talk about this in terms of the the fantasy of reverse colonization, the way that, you know, someone like Spencer and a number of different incels, white supremacists, you know, anti feminists imagine themselves to be sort of under attack by an establishment.
David M. Higgins:You get your cathedral, dark enlightenment, kind of, you know, all these sorts of things. And I wanted to ask you about this. I tend to focus on the way that speculative fiction enables reactionaries to sort of really dig into that imaginary victimhood. We are the ones who are being oppressed and held back by, these vast colonizing forces. Whereas you are drawing a lot more attention, I think very importantly, to these fantasies, or dreams of supremacy.
David M. Higgins:In your book, I really love the way that you approach this by looking at things like geek supremacy, fan identification with, slans, right, the science fictional trope of the Pariah elite. So I've been looking forward to talking with you about your sense of the relationship between fantasies of victimhood and fantasies of supremacy. You know, how would you describe that? Right? I wonder if it seems as though there are certainly people like Spencer who are unabashed about, you know, being supremacist, but a lot of mom and pop who are others, in my experience, a broader middle of the road fan base that doesn't imagine they don't want to be on Magneto's side.
David M. Higgins:Right? But they're I don't know. What what do you make of the relationship between victimhood and supremacy within these kinds of fan cultures, within this sort of imaginative matrix?
Jordan S. Carroll:I think there's there yeah. There's definitely overlap. I mean, on one hand, you have victimization, which is the idea of being oppressed. On the other hand, you have this idea that you haven't ascended to your place in natural hierarchy, that you're being kept out of the place where you're supposed to be by the oppressor. It seems like these are related, although obviously not exactly the same thing.
Jordan S. Carroll:And we often see a fantasy of stolen potential. The the way that this oppression is manifesting is not just that you're causing me to suffer, but you're preventing me from fulfilling my destiny or fulfilling some kind of biological or genetic propensity that's in me, and that's part of my identity. And so that's damaging to who I am because I'm in this position. I recently stumbled on an Alex Jones video, the the conspiracy theorist, And he was saying exactly this, that his audience has all this human potential. They could be the next Magellan.
Jordan S. Carroll:They could be out exploring the world, exploring the universe. And yet the globalists have stolen that future from them essentially and put them in in their place, a place of subordination and a place of frustration. It's a kind of victimhood, but it's also a victimhood that's imagined not as I'm suffering in the here and now so much, but I could have been something much greater and now I'm not.
David M. Higgins:I wonder and I haven't thought about this as much, I think, as you have. I I wonder if victimhood identification or interpolation, reaching out, like, look at this potential that's being held back from you. Right? Becomes kind of a rhetorical way of enlisting people who otherwise wouldn't feel comfortable identifying in a supremacist way with I'm thinking like the shift from white nationalism to white identitarianism, which is sort of like a watered down language for the kinds of things that you would see in the white supremacist movement. And we've had we've had Richard Spencer types who are like, yeah.
David M. Higgins:We need to get away from Nazi imagery sometimes. We need to put a softer public face on this. So identitarianism. Oh, we're not we're not saying we need to be supremacists. We just need to embrace our identity in the same way that everyone is being told that they can celebrate their identities.
David M. Higgins:I find myself wondering if victimhood identification sort of, like, is a way of softening up or enrolling people in, like but then, actually, your potential is being taken away from you and, you're commit you know, you you get straight into sort of anti immigrant sentiment and all the rest here. Right?
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, we definitely see this with the intellectual history of the alt right, a movement away from, say, the white power movement, which is overtly supremacist, towards an idea of, yeah, white identitarianism as somehow a new multiculturalism. This idea that each nation or each race, each civilization will be free to live up to its own potential without the interference of other ethnic, cultural, or racial groups. And yet, this clearly devolves rather quickly back into a supremacist discourse. People will often say, oh, I just want everybody to have their own ethno state.
Jordan S. Carroll:But often, there's not so subtle undercurrent of genocidal or exterminationist ideology that always is waiting in the wings there, where the only way to have that ethnic state always involves dominating, exterminating, oppressing, and otherwise liquidating other populations in the nation. So, yeah, I think that victimhood is definitely part of the, arsenal of strategies that fascists and white nationalists and identitarians use. But often, it kind of feels like special pleading, and it's a a cover up for what they really want in the end.
David M. Higgins:Yeah. I guess I'm thinking more about I feel like in science fiction before World War two, for example, it's much more possible to see all throughout cultural production supremacist fantasies. But after World War II, I think this might be the limitations of my reading, but after World War II and particularly after the Holocaust, right, like it just becomes in mainstream science fiction less cool to be on the side of the supremacists or the colonizers or the people who are trying to, you know, build the Eugenicist empire or whatever. That doesn't mean it's not there, but it's like it it has to sort of go underground, but not that far underground, which is I think what you're what you're sort of gesturing to.
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I think within mainstream science fiction, the idea that fans are slans, fans are superhuman mutants who need to go off to start their own colony of fellow slans, that obviously goes away rather quickly. And I think that's in part why white nationalists have to often read science fiction against the grain. So we see, for example, the figure of Khan in Star Trek as a kind of repudiation of the, eugenics project and the idea of a superhuman.
Jordan S. Carroll:And yet when Richard Spencer turns to Star Trek, he sees mister Spock and the rest of the crew as Jewish Marxists, but he sees Khan despite the ambiguous ethnicity of this character, as the the figure that he wants to identify with, as the superhuman who's gonna impose his will upon the world and is going to overthrow a tolerant, inclusive, socialistic, and democratic federation.
David M. Higgins:Yeah. So I I think this gets to something really fascinating in your, in your work. What you're just talking about, that reading of Khan in speculative whiteness, you kind of talk about an irony bypass, right, or a kind of hermeneutics of obtuseness that readers like Spencer bring to bear, which is to say everybody knows or or it's fairly obvious that this was meant to be a critique, but I'm going to read it as though I'm going to read it straight, right, in a certain kind of a way. You wanna talk a little bit about how you see the right wing figures and right wing fan cultures bypassing irony or being obtuse about their hermeneutics in that way? Because I think it's a really important observation about about the way that science fiction is being read.
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, part of it is that some of these critics are either bad readers or are reading in a very interested way rather than necessarily unfolding what the text actually says. But some of it does feel a bit like the kinds of moves that, say, cultural studies has done. We've seen in recent decades this idea that texts often include subversive or countercultural elements even as they're being disavowed. And so frequently in the alt right and, associated white nationalist circles, there's this idea of recuperating the disavowed fascist figure.
Jordan S. Carroll:It might be the villain, or it might be some aspect of the antihero fantasies about Batman, for example, as this superior, aristocratic, but lawless figure that they want to to make their own. And so there's a a tendency among the alt right to try to find the submerged or suppressed fascist dimensions of all of these texts. But part of what they end up doing is, I think, changing science fictional or speculative texts in a fundamental way. I think that they're not only reading something into it or or discovering a hidden meaning, They're also approaching it, I think, differently than most science fiction critics would. We think of science fiction following Samuel Delaney as subjunctive, as an exploration of possible worlds, whereas the alt right often thinks of science fiction as imperative.
Jordan S. Carroll:It's a command. It's something that we need to fulfill. When they see a dystopia, they don't always see a critique of the present, a possible future that we should warn against, but rather they often see it as, well, let's go build the the future from Warhammer 40 k. Let's go build the kind of fascist or authoritarian future that science fiction often presents, but only in order to negate or deny?
David M. Higgins:Yeah. I think you get to a really interesting question about genre and speculation and futurity here. In speculative whiteness, you say, I think following a lot of science fiction critics, Delaney, Souven, and others, right, that science fiction has this potential, right? Science fiction is, at least within our kind of critical worlds, the argument is that science fiction, speculative fiction can promote radical change at its best. It can offer a radically historicizing gesture that reveals the present as contingent while allowing us to imagine how things might be otherwise.
David M. Higgins:So that is to say speculative fiction, science fiction gestures out towards something that we don't know, right, or that we haven't imagined, as being possible yet. And then you note that there's something reactionary speculative fiction critics, right, to do something fundamentally different. In your book, you draw on, Badiou to say that, the product of reactionary science fiction instead is pseudo rupture, a kind of solipsistic speculation that can't imagine anything outside or after itself. And I'm really curious about this because I've been wondering if, you know, Mike Cernovich, the Pizzagate guy, would say that it's all postmodernism. You are imposing your narrative.
David M. Higgins:We're imposing our narratives. It's just a battle. It's a war of all against all in terms of whose narrative is gonna win. And so I'm gonna get my reading community together, and we're gonna read Dune this way. And if we get enough likes and shares, then we beat your reading of Dune.
David M. Higgins:Right? And so there's nothing formally different. It's just really a struggle within these reading communities and interpretive communities. But you, I think, are saying something different, and I like it. I think you're saying that there's, like, a fundamentally different approach to science fiction here, something that gestures outward versus something that's, like, narcissistic or solipsistic.
David M. Higgins:Would you agree with that? Am I characterizing you correctly?
Jordan S. Carroll:I think so. Yeah. They have fundamentally different reading protocols than what we might think of as critical science fiction. Part of that comes down to, as you point out, their inability to grapple with history. They have a profoundly anti historicist way of reading, and it often embodies what might be called destiny thinking, which is a term that Francis Parker Yockey uses, I think, where, you know, they talk about the future, but they always see the future as, in some sense, already here, as already embodied in the white race or the or already inside white culture or white civilization, and it just has to kind of be manifested.
Jordan S. Carroll:And so it's, I think, a very impoverished way of thinking about the future. And what we might call critical science fiction, we can imagine all of these different futures. Like, what if a Nigerian space agency wins the race to Mars? Or what if in the late eighteenth century, India or China industrialized faster before, say, England? We can imagine all of these possibilities, none of which actually have to be realized.
Jordan S. Carroll:These are just sort of conjectures about what could be. So there's a multiplicity of possible futures, I think, for most critical science fiction readers. For the alt right, I think it's either a future in which white men realize their destiny, which already existed a thousand years ago, or white men failed to do this and they degenerate, and, ultimately, their civilization is doomed. There's, I think, a kind of, like, very one track idea of the future or maybe even a maybe a binary idea of the future. Either the destiny is realized or it's thwarted by racial outsiders who are going to try to stop white men from becoming who they are, essentially.
David M. Higgins:Yeah. The way you talk about that in relationship to history particularly resonates with me. Like, I find I'm always trying to encourage students to look at things historically and be like, there's so much more here than you might have thought at first. The more we dig at historical detail, the more we discover that the map is never the territory. We, right, there's there's so much more than your representation of history will ever capture.
David M. Higgins:History is always richer and more complicated, more endlessly verdant, in its complexity than we can ever grasp. Whereas I think you're saying in the hands of white nationalists with that destiny thinking, they might start off and say, Oh, history is more complicated than you think, but it's always the same story deeper down, Right? It's always about the struggle between races or this question of destiny or something like that.
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I think that's getting towards the big contradiction that makes this way of thinking and really makes all of speculative whiteness incoherent. Because on the fundamental level, it's identity. Things will always be the same forever. But then they also wanna have historical difference and rupture and change.
Jordan S. Carroll:So white people will always be the same, and yet they'll somehow make a new history and make you know, invent a Dyson sphere that will encapsulate the sun and upgrade their IQs until they're super smart and and build the face tentacles for themselves. And yet somehow, like, everything will remain exactly the same. So there's always this push and pull between historical rupture and difference, like, oh, the modernistic future that they're going to create. But then this idea that nothing really can change for white people. They're they have the same DNA, basically, or the same spirit or whatever they wanna call it, the same identity that they've always had.
David M. Higgins:You know, I absolutely see that, and I see that you focus in this book and in in your comment just now around whiteness and white identity. As I read speculative whiteness, it seems also very clear, that this is about masculinity. When reading your account of this, it quickly becomes clear that we're talking about not just white identity but in almost all the examples that I see that you talk about like white masculine supremacy. I wanted to give you an opening to kind of talk more about that to what extent is masculinity and gender a part of this picture? Obviously, these things are entwined.
David M. Higgins:How do you see them as interconnected in the figures that you're looking at?
Jordan S. Carroll:I think it's a yeah. It's a big part of specula of whiteness. When we see somebody like Richard Spencer, he just takes for granted that he's primarily talking about white men. And he often will tap into a settler colonial mentality, imagining space as a kind of frontier that will allow rugged, masculine white men to face danger, to find themselves among the stars, and especially to handle risks. He suggests that white men are too secure.
Jordan S. Carroll:They're too cloistered. They're too pampered. That they need space exploration as a way of reclaiming their masculinity. And this, in in a lot of ways, is just it feels like a throwback to the eighteen nineties and mists of the frontier, but transposed onto the moons of Jupiter, essentially.
David M. Higgins:Mhmm. I know that among women who support white nationalist movements. Right? Do you see similarities, differences, different ways that these kinds of ideologies and speculations are embraced or resisted, right, within I'm thinking of Sabour Darby's book, right, if I remember correctly. How do you see differences between how this plays out in different gendered spaces or communities among white nationalists?
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I think that that in those cases, what we're talking about is reproductive futurity. A lot of the discourse around femininity and around gender and sexuality in the alt right is very much about preserving white birth rates, building a future for white children, imagining a kind of pastoral future filled with trad wives, these kind of imagined traditionalist housewives who are going to build up the white population and thereby usher in a better world. In some ways, I feel like that that there might be a tension there between that kind of fantasy of the pastoral future and some of the more strange fantasies of what future reproduction might look like for white people or what the world will look like. But we do see them overlap.
Jordan S. Carroll:I have one example in my text of somebody imagining the future of space colonization that also looks a lot like this sanitized and really falsified vision of nineteen fifties domesticity. So, yeah, I think that reproductive futurity in some ways is related to speculative whiteness, although often it takes that in a different direction using different kinds of genre conventions, more about, again, the pastoral, but but also a kind of sentimentalism that we see resisted on the alt right, which, as I pointed out, is often more about risk, self overcoming, and a kind of manly refusal to care about the consequences of one's actions.
David M. Higgins:Yeah. In terms of the reproductive piece of this, it seems so profoundly the way that you talk about this in the book and the the example that you gesture towards are so profoundly sexualized in some ways. There's this focus on, delayed gratification, self denial, like white men are the future because they're not completely overwhelmed by their id and their urges in the way that all other people are, and thus they can build civilization. You're kind of talking about this with the sort of cold climate theory and all the rest of that. This is on my mind because a friend recently shared with me a Disney educational film from 1967 called Family Planning.
David M. Higgins:It was released around the same time as the Population Bomb book was released in 1968, and it's basically Disney showing this movie basically like the short educational film. It's basically like we we have this population problem, so you it's and it's all people of color need to stop reproducing so fast. And here's this educational video that is going to help you learn to have some self control, right, as the sort of like like gesture of this. And I see like when looking at a video like that, I see what you are pointing toward in this one must be able to write the the sort of Spencerian kind of fantasy, like, control one's urges or all those kinds of things. Right?
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, there's definitely some level of this that is about all kinds of sexual anxieties. When we look at the scientific racist discourse, it rather quickly becomes pornographic. Like, in fact, one of the major scientific racists was caught out for using, I think it was, like, nineteenth century pornography to establish some of his main claims. So on one hand, there is this idea that white men are in control of themselves, that they plan for the future, so they have a limited number of children, and they exercise family planning, and they provide.
Jordan S. Carroll:And then there's always the racial other that is presented as somehow impulsive, out of control, hypersexual, and therefore as threatening to white hetero masculinity essentially. But there's also, as you point out, I think, a level of this that is maybe a a compensatory fantasy. I mean, it's like the old meme, you know, while you were out out partying, I studied the blade. Like, this idea of, like, you all are having such a great time. I am saving myself for a future in which I can use my energies in order to build the white ethno state.
Jordan S. Carroll:And so it is really, again, like, making sense, I think, in some cases of disappointment. It's a kind of geek of like, well, you know, maybe I don't have all these pleasures, but I'm really smart and gifted, and I have all this potential. And someday, it's gonna pay off, I'm sure. It it seems like some of the undercurrent of some of these discourses.
David M. Higgins:You know, the other thing I was thinking when I was reading your book is, man, for decades now in fan studies, the work from Constance, Penley and Jenkins into transformative works and cultures has been trying to elevate the fan, has been trying to say what fans are doing is so much more and shouldn't be dismissed as trollish, awful, backwards, and all of that. And here's your book and fan culture comes out rough here. Do you have any thoughts about that? I mean I noticed that you don't necessarily dive into the fan culture, fan study sort of current here, right? How do you feel about, like, how fan studies people will respond to the the rough treatment of fans here, even though obviously these fans may be need rough treatment?
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, I think I, you know, I should say I I'm a fan.
David M. Higgins:Yeah.
Jordan S. Carroll:I'm a science fiction fan. I'm I'm a geek. I'm a nerd. And so in some ways, that that makes me want to be more critical. I mean, I really do value fan studies.
Jordan S. Carroll:I do really think that they are absolutely correct that we have to think of fans as not just either backwards weirdos or dupes of mass culture. Fans are clearly creative, and fan practices can be really liberatory. But I think it's a matter of of history. When fan studies emerged, we were at a very different moment where it did feel like fans were being depicted on Saturday Night Live as these strange people, and they were perceived as somehow marginal and stunted. And fan studies allowed us to see that actually so many great things are happening in fan communities.
Jordan S. Carroll:But over the past, let's say, decade and a half, it feels like fandom has gone from being the niche subculture of the twentieth century to being the cultural dominant, especially with the rise of Silicon Valley and the Marvel Cinematic Universe and just the larger mainstreaming of fan culture. I think it's a moment in which we just need to come to terms with the fact that fandom can be emancipatory. It can also be reactionary. I think the same thing with science fiction. Like, for so long, a lot of science fiction studies, and rightly so, was about showing that science fiction can do really progressive, formally interesting, and ultimately radical things.
Jordan S. Carroll:And that was as in part as a maneuver within science fiction culture to try to win out over maybe the more right leaning or backwards looking aspects of, science fiction culture. But, also, it was clearly part of a push for academic legitimacy, critical legitimacy, and ultimately canonization. But now, like, most universities have a science fiction literature class. And so I feel like we're at a moment where we're strong enough, we being science fiction critics, strong enough to kind of say, let's take stock. And I think we should hold fast to that critical dimension, but also recognize, and many critics and scholars have done this, that there is an uglier side to science fiction that we need to come to terms with now that we recognize the utopian dimensions of science
David M. Higgins:fiction. And thus something similar perhaps in fan studies, right, where and and there are scholars in fan studies who have done some of this work already, of course, but as a whole, moving away from carving out a space for legitimacy to saying, oh, wow, fan practices are powerful and not all powerful fan practices are good. Right? Sometimes that that very power, I think you're saying, that very power of, fan practice in the hands of reactionary fans is also powerful, right, and can do a different kind of transformative work.
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, the other thing I think is that the the presence of the Internet has changed a lot of this. I mean, it it records so many fan practices, including the worst kinds. And so it's just become unavoidable to see some people who are genuine fans of different media properties acting in the worst way possible.
David M. Higgins:You don't ever mention Elon Musk here, but I couldn't help myself but thinking about him at several different points. Were you thinking about him also at various points when when writing this? I mean, when you're talking about tech bro pariah elites and victim supremacists. Right? Like, one one can't read this in the current moment without, without certain figures coming to mind.
David M. Higgins:Were you thinking about Elon much at all in in your process here?
Jordan S. Carroll:Unfortunately, yes. So I think that speculative whiteness has mutated in different directions, and one of them is this tech bro culture. And in particular, ideas like long termism, which is the idea that we should make ethical choices in the present based on the next thousand or million years. And part of that is often an obsession with population growth, and in particular, the maximization of smart babies. And so I feel like Elon Musk's obsession with smart people, including himself, and I should maybe put that in air quotes, having as many babies as possible seems deeply implicated in a kind of eugenicist logic.
Jordan S. Carroll:And the idea that the future progress of technology and and science is contingent on having this particular population, this particular biogenetic potential that we need a lot of high IQ people to innovate in the future, and that's the only way we're going to colonize Mars or build our robot overlords as Elon Musk fantasizes about. I mean, we could talk about this, like, the where's my flying car fantasy on on the right that, you know, we should be so much further in the future. And yet, we've elected all these liberals and progressives, and that has resulted in the supposedly inevitable progress of history slowing down or halting. And if only the civil rights legislation of the nineteen sixties or whatever hadn't been passed, we'd be much further along. This is sort of a fantasy that they often have.
David M. Higgins:You put me in mind of, like, in science fiction fandoms, there can be a the Empire is sexy sort of, tendency around in Star Wars. Like, I'm not really into the Empire, but those stormtrooper uniforms and those crisp cut. You know, there's something very sexy about the Empire and the dark side, right? And so what what you're sort of pointing to here is that like in terms of the compensatory fantasy, in terms of the aesthetics, there's something that cuts straight into making fascism kind of libidinally appealing here, Right? I don't know what if if you if I if I'm over reading star the the appeal of Star Wars Imperials there.
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. No. I I think you're right. I mean, a lot of it is investing in this aesthetic and eroticizing this aesthetic, And it's it's hard not to see them as caught up in the uniforms, but also this erotic fantasy of domination and transgression that a lot of them have as well. Yeah.
Jordan S. Carroll:I think that there's definitely that kind of psychosexual undercurrent running through a lot of
David M. Higgins:this. Well, so that gets to one of my other questions, you know, the question of fascism. You pull no punches in your book, when it comes to describing these various reactionary figures and groups as fascists. You use the term alt right and fascist and fascism fairly interchangeably throughout the book. There's been a lot of conversation lately, so we're recording prior to the election.
David M. Higgins:By the time this comes out, the election will have occurred, but we're in a cultural moment where, it's very tempting to refer to others in the political spectrum as fascist, and this kind of goes back and forth. People on the right call people on the left fascist, People on the left call people on the right fascist. And there's been a lot of discussion about this, right? Just, last week from where I'm sitting, there was the New York Magazine ran a piece exploring, historian Robert Paxton's initial hesitation to describing Trumpism as fascist, initial hesitation to describing Trumpism as fascism and his later conversion. He changed his mind after January 6, and said, no.
David M. Higgins:I think the label does in fact fit even though, I don't think it's necessarily useful in the larger kind of cultural conversation. But you you take a very clear stand here.
Jordan S. Carroll:You're like, this is fact
David M. Higgins:what we are looking at here is fascism. And I'd love to hear you talk more about that, your commitment to that specific term, which seems, I think, very thoughtful. You're not just knee jerking that. What's your thinking behind that term here?
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, I think it's complicated insofar as I've always wondered why definitions seem to be the center of these conversations about fascism. But I think that it's useful to think about these categories and why we use them. I mean, for me, a fascist is anyone who wants to overthrow the state or start a revolution in order to maintain what is perceived as a natural hierarchy, especially a racial hierarchy or a gendered hierarchy or a hierarchy of cultures and civilizations, and to purify the nation. And so in that regard, I think phenomena like QAnon or January 6 must be understood as fascist.
Jordan S. Carroll:On the other hand, though, I do think that we need to be mindful of the fact that the the liberal democratic state that many fascists wanna overthrow is also thoroughly implicated in white supremacy and has always been essentially. So I think it's important to point out the fascist exception, to point out the moment in which these right wing politics move towards something that's not just reactionary but is out and out fascist. But I also think that we need to try not to pretend as if white supremacy is always something that happens over there and that isn't just as much bound up in law and order, maintenance of the state, and maintenance of the nation as it already exists.
David M. Higgins:Yeah. It's interesting. You you get to a double valence of the notion of revolution there that kind of mirrors what we were talking about about history and, reading protocols, right? A kind of revolution that is about overthrowing things so that we can always get to the building of the supremacy that we want, right? It's always the sort of same story, the purification, the national purity, these kinds of things versus, you know, it's like there's a party that wants to hold some space for a type of more authentic revolution, a revolution that gestures toward the thing that lies beyond the horizon that we can't see yet.
David M. Higgins:Right? But I also take your point that, there are fascisms everywhere within this sort of terrain that need to be kept, you know, kept in mind.
Jordan S. Carroll:Yeah. I mean, I think that maybe this this gets back to your earlier point about narcissism where the the rupture that the, outright imagines or the rupture that fascists imagine is not really a rupture. It's a pseudo rupture. It's the continuing continuation of one's own identity that, you know, we're going to become who we are is what Richard Spencer will say, for example. And that means that in terms of science fiction, they can't imagine a future that's gonna be alien to them, and they certainly can't imagine any encounter that doesn't end in bloodshed there's this reading that, Richard Spencer does of of Solaris, and in particular, the film version, the Tarkovsky version of Solaris, where he, you know, describes this narrative that's about going to another planet and encountering a radically different alien being.
Jordan S. Carroll:It's like a planet sized I don't even wanna call it intelligence. We don't know if it's intelligent, but a planet sized being that's fundamentally different from the humans. But he reads this as white men go into space and they they find themselves. And so he can't imagine a future in which we might encounter something very different. And he also can't imagine that the protagonist of the future might not look and feel like us.
Jordan S. Carroll:So much of science fiction is about suggesting that we are going to maybe not be superseded, but followed by new kinds of human beings or new kinds of beings in general that have very different capacities, very different ways of interacting in the world. And I think the alt right can't really imagine that. They believe that the the protagonists of the future are gonna be the same ones that dominate the world today, which is white western men.
David M. Higgins:So So how do you break through that? Right? I guess would be my question. What advice would you give for creators? I mean, I talk with a lot of authors.
David M. Higgins:Or for teachers and scholars who work in this area? I mean, it it seems like, alright. You can write a work of science fiction and it can either be taken you could like something like Solaris could either be taken as white men go out into space and find themselves or, you go out in space and actually have to come to a hard encounter with something that is not you, right? It's like are you are we always looking in the mirror or are we looking beyond encountering something right like outside of that? I mean a lot of work in the sort of industry right now is, representational work, right, in terms of inclusion, voices, who is portrayed, who is contributing, who's being heard, who's not being heard.
David M. Higgins:Like, what would you say, you know, like in looking at the way that that right wing fan cultures are working and the way that people like Spencer are appropriating these sorts of texts. I mean, I know it's ridiculous. We can't say, can we inoculate science fiction against reactionary temps? No. But I mean, what do you where do you think the the the where do you think the fight is here in terms of making a difference?
Jordan S. Carroll:I feel like that there are two strategies that one can use, and I I'm not sure. I think they they might have to be used in tandem. I mean, one is and the one that I kind of end the book with is this idea that tomorrow belongs to everybody. That the future is something that we all collectively create and that everybody will, at least in the utopian world, take part in the creation of that shared future, that shared world. Part of that is creating science fiction texts that are more diverse, that are more inclusive, and that have no part of the white supremacist fantasies that people like Richard Spencer try to peddle.
Jordan S. Carroll:But part of that is obviously expanding the fan community to include other voices and other perspectives that particularly in the early to mid twentieth century, were often excluded. On the other hand, though, I wonder if some of Fredric Jameson's thoughts on science fiction and utopia are also useful here. For Jameson, we have to, in some ways, think the unthinkable. We have to imagine the future that's beyond a break that we can't fully comprehend and fully know. And so I think that there is something about uncertainty and something about unknowability, something about not being able to fully represent utopia that might also be useful here because it prevents us from simply copy pasting the identity of a particular group into the future.
Jordan S. Carroll:It forces us to come to terms with the fact that the future is open ended. The future is not gonna be as simply a continuation of what's come before. And that means that the future is definitely not going to be white supremacist destiny thinking, just the realization of an already existing potential. There's a level of unknowability to the future that we need to come to terms with and not imagine that whiteness in the hierarchies that subtended will will exist forever.
David M. Higgins:Jordan, I don't think we could have scripted better closing comments, right, to, to cut to cap off, the, the interview. So, I think that, I'm going to applaud there. Thank you so, so much. That's a great, a great set of reflections. So just to recap again, this is David Higgins.
David M. Higgins:I've been talking with Jordan S. Carroll about his brilliant book Speculative Whiteness, Science Fiction and the Alt Right. You've really influenced my thinking, right, quite a bit on, on a lot of these these topics. So I really, I really appreciate this book, and I appreciate you inviting me to be the one to do the interview. Thank you.
Jordan S. Carroll:And I should say reverse colonization was a huge influence on this project, so it's it's great that we could have this conversation. Thank you so much.
David M. Higgins:Great. Well, thanks so much.