Abstract
Resnick’s Kirinyaga is a novel set in a twenty-second-century terraformed planetoid within Earth’s solar system. Its inhabitants are Kenyans who left an ecologically devastated Earth to pursue the pre-colonial way of life of the Kikuyu people as an intentional community in outer space. Koriba, Kirinyaga’s narrator, is an elderly storyteller who was exiled back to earth after his people accepted modern technology, despite his insistence they maintain traditional customs. As a white American writing about native Africans, Resnick has generated controversy by potentially asserting an uncritical form of cultural relativism. This essay demonstrates how philosophical stances regarding utopianism factor in the novel and demonstrate the relevance of Kirinyaga to debates about the pursuit of the ideal societies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. “Named for Victoria, Queen of England.” 1973. In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 190–193. London: Routledge, 1995.
Berlin, Isaiah. “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West.” 1978. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity, edited by Henry Hardy, 20–48. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Berlin, Isaiah. “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” 1988. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity, edited by Henry Hardy, 1–19. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Bhabha, Homi K. “The Commitment to Theory.” New Formations 5 (1988): 5–23.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Desegregating American Literary Studies.” In Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, edited by Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, 121–134. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hartmann, Ivor W. “Introduction.” In Afro SF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Edited by Hartmann, 6–7. StoryTime, 2012.
Hopkinson, Nalo.“Introduction.” In So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, Edited by Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, 7–9. Vancouver: Arsenal, 2004.
“Introductory Comments to ‘Hybridity’.” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 183–184. London: Routledge, 1995.
Lavender III, Isiah. Race in American Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Masri, Heather. “Introductory Comments to ‘Kirinyaga’ by Mike Resnick.” In Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts, edited by Masri, 811. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2008.
Mehan, Uppinder. “Final Thoughts.” In So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Mehan, 269–270. Vancouver: Arsenal, 2004.
Resnick, Mike. Ivory. New York: Tor Books, 1988.
Resnick, Mike. Paradise: A Chronicle of a Distant World. New York: Tor Books, 1989.
Resnick, Mike. “Introduction.” In Future Earths: Under African Skies, edited by Mike Resnick and Gardner Dozois, 226–234. New York: Daw Books, 1993.
Resnick, Mike. Kirinyaga. New York: Ballantine, 1998.
Resnick, Mike. “Uh … Guys–My Name Isn’t Koriba.” In Once a Fan …, 226–234. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2002.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism.” Minnesota Review 7, nos. 3–4 (1967): 222–230.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Utopia—The Problem of Definition.” Extrapolation 16, no. 2 (1975): 137–148.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Saunders, Charles R. “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction.” In Dark Matter, edited by Sheree R. Thomas, 398–404. New York: Warner/Aspect, 2000.
Tilton, Lois. “Strangling the Baby: Cultural Relativism in Mike Resnick’s ‘Kirinyaga’.” The New York Review of Science Fiction (May 1989): 11–12.
Van Gelder, Gordon. “‘Let’s Go Look at the Natives’: Conflicts of Culture in Mike Resnick’s ‘Kirinyaga.’” The New York Review of Science Fiction (May 1989): 11–14.
Williams, Lynn F., and Martha Bartter. “You Can’t Go Home Again: Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick.” In The Utopian Fantastic, edited by Bartter, 91–100. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.
Wonham, Henry B. “Introduction.” In Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, Edited by Wonham, 1–15. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tucker, J.A. (2019). Utopianism, Relativism, Cultural Imperialism: Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga. In: Ventura, P., Chan, E. (eds) Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19470-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19470-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19469-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19470-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)