Troping Identity in Arkady Martine’s Space Opera: From Historical Realism to Quantum Anthropomorphization

Rosi Braidotti’s theory of “nomadic subject” (2011) has shifted the focus from traveller in the literal sense of the word to subject as a process; becoming subject entails a denial of universals in the construction of identity which is redefined as situated embodiment in the world, open to the heteronormativity of changing social codes and accepted modes of living or of conceiving otherness. Nevertheless, travel has always been associated with an explicit ethos, whether as a pious pilgrimage, educational world tour or the grand narrative of civilizing mission. Located on various maps, real or imaginary, civilizations are brought into contact by the huge number of migrants, the problems they raise including the relationship between third worlds and metropolitan cities/ countries, the migrants’ othering by mainstream populations, the migrants’ desire to be naturalised and the estrangement from their true selves as a result. By building simulation models, speculative fiction probes deeply into underground concerns which well up to the surface in postcolonial literature, being expected to produce cognitive enlightenment. Relieved from the material deprivations of the colonial past, the postcolonial subject is now caught in the process of identitarian reconstruction.