He, Jianfeng. Minor Democracies: Reimagining Collectivity in Multiethnic Speculative Fiction. 2025. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
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This dissertation examines how contemporary speculative fiction by multiethnic writers in the United States reimagines questions of collectivity and possibilities of democratic social relations and collective belonging on small scales. Amid the ongoing institutional crisis of democracy in the United States, this project argues that recent speculative literature has undertaken the task of reimagining collective subject formations rooted in personal and intimate relationships, familial and kinship bonds, and practices of community-building, while gesturing toward transformative social and political possibilities. Chapter one reads Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and argues that the protagonist’s struggles at building a symbiotic collective demonstrates the profound mutual dependency and vulnerability between the vampire Ina and the humans. Chapter two looks at Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and considers how the collective narrator’s communal retelling of experiences of the mystical protagonist enables the subaltern community to reclaim an ambivalent yet subversive collective agency. Chapter three focuses on Nisi Shawl’s Kinning and demonstrates how embodied forms of collectivity across the personal, the global, and the molecular become inextricably entangled with material agency, individual autonomy and desire, as well as global revolutionary struggles.