Nostalgia for Infinity: New Space Opera and Neoliberal Globalism

by Jerome Dale Winter

Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English

University of California, Riverside, June 2015

 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson

This doctoral dissertation argues that contemporary postcolonial literature from

and about the Caribbean, Scotland, and India responds to American and British popular

genre fiction, specifically the subgenre known as New Space Opera, in allegorizing the

neoliberal processes, conditions, and experiences of globalization in the world-system.

My project discusses works by postcolonial authors who have yet to receive theoretical

investigation from this perspective, including Iain M. Banks, Karen Lord, and Nalo

Hopkinson, as well as important transatlantic SF authors whose work has yet to be

discussed in terms of globalism including Samuel R. Delany, M. John Harrison, Gwyneth

Jones, Bruce Sterling, and C.J. Cherryh. I argue that these often critically neglected

space-opera novels reconfigure for our times the conventional trappings of traditional

space opera — such as such as faster-than-light starships, galactic empires, doomsday

weapons, and dramatic encounters with exotic aliens — to reflect and refract the global

dimensions of our neoliberal and postcolonial world-system transfigured by

contemporary technoculture. Consequently, I argue that New Space Opera novels address

and intervene in sociopolitical and historical developments specific to the cultures in

which they are written. New Space Opera written from Scottish, Indian, and Caribbean

perspectives interrogates the interweaving of nation-states and transnational culture,

especially in connection with the rapidly accelerating technological, social, and economic

changes facing our planet today

https://escholarship.org/content/qt2n63z8dv/qt2n63z8dv_noSplash_c7c552d04b9e38b239ea82f5e15fa9b1.pdf