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Fantasy Fiction and Breaking Barriers to STEAM for Black Students
By Mia Subade and Dr. Benjamin M. Drury
LaValle’s Destroyer criticizes Haraway’s version of the cyborg and this “utopia” it will exist in through the black cyborg. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway asserts that the cyborg “is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with… other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity… The cyborg does not dream of continuity on the model of the organic family” (Haraway 71). Her version of the cyborg is a half-human half-machine whose existence does away from political identities such as gender and sexuality. She states that the cyborg “has no truck” — meaning that it refuses to be involved with — with anything that tempts an organic wholeness, like a biological organism. She calls for a new type of being that transcends earthly dominions and ideals to embrace being one with technology. This, in turn, will produce a world with a “utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination” (72). Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, as well as Wynter’s critique of humanism, can be related to the historic divestment in Black community schools and its impact on limiting the exposure of advanced sciences to Black students.
