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Abstract
Mainstream science fiction such as Disney’s TRON: Legacy (2010) lauds the utopian potential of the Internet/cyberspace and artificial intelligence (AI). This is sometimes tempered with concerns that AI in cyberspace will become too powerful and rebel against its creators – a concern based on fears that world powers will lose control of the globally networked systems of people and machines that they have dominated in the postcolonial era. By contrast, Nalo Hopkinson’s postcolonial cyberpunk novel Midnight Robber (2000) views AI and cyberspace through the lens of Afro-Caribbean epistemology. As a consequence, AI becomes less frightening in its potential, cyberspace becomes a space for accounting for the ways information technology is complicit in colonial projects, and technological appropriation provides hope for building a better world.
Notes
1. The argument here is not that the producers set out to make a racist film, but that the film reveals just how embedded in the mainstream American unconscious is the settler colonial tendency to racialize the Other in ways specific to a given situation, even if those ways contradict racial formations in other colonial settings.
2. As is the case with many other proper names in the novel, Toussaint is named after a Caribbean historical figure. Toussaint L’Ouverture was a leader of the Haitian Revolution, which ended in 1804 and was the only successful slave uprising to lead to statehood.
3. Half-Way Tree is a commuter hub in Kingston that was once a site of revolutionary activity. However, it is increasingly becoming an upscale neighborhood. The naming of the prison planet as New Half-Way Tree suggests that it is a space to once again spark revolutionary activity in a society that is becoming complacent in its techno-utopia.