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BY GARY MORRIS, in Bright Lights Film Journal

excerpt:

The physical growth of America depended on the expropriation of land and the colonization of its owners, a process mythologized in stories of the Old West with its self-sacrificing settlers, brave pioneers, and romantic gunslingers. The enemies were Native Americans and Mexicans who resisted the white outsiders who came armed with both weapons and a self-derived moral/religious sanction. American appropriation of European science fiction followed a similar, if less bloody, pattern…

Photo by Seshu Badrinath

article by Claire Light in Hyphen: Asian America Unabridged

excerpt:

Telepathic lovers attend a bondage play party at a gothic mansion. The scion of space colonists dives for orgasm pearls which give her history lessons. A spaceport convict receives training in sexual submission. These and other fictograms are brought to you by the fantastic and freaky imagination of Cecilia Tan, an embodiment and observer of intersections. Her current favorite is between science fiction and bondage/domination erotica, two great tastes that taste so great together that she founded Circlet Press to publish such confections. Just over a decade old, Circlet Press has established a small but permanent niche in the ever widening, and ever more reputable, publishing field of erotica.

Colorlines Magazine; 12/22/2002; article by Libero Della Piana

excerpt (Click on excerpt to access the rest):

Science fiction has been a part of the Black American experience from the first moment slaves looked to the skies to follow the “drinking gourd” North to freedom. To enslaved people ripped from their homeland and dragged to a new world, the idea that the stars would lead them to an unknown land of freedom might have seemed a fantastic fiction, an imaginary hope. That the symbol of freedom was both a distant star and a symbol of the African communal past is no small irony. The tension of black existence has always been a pull between the hope of the future and the magical legacy of …