Indeed, since October 13, 2020, the United States has called for several of its historical allies to sign onto a bilateral agreement known as the Artemis Accords, a diplomatic effort to ensure the extractive property rights of any national citizens who might be “engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell [it].” Contrary to mid-twentieth century developments in international space law, where from 1960 to 1979 various subcommittees within the United Nations negotiated the reclassification of celestial bodies as a kind of protected commons or “common heritage” of humanity, the United States and its allies now project a more flagrant vision of imperialist fantasy and unfettered capitalist desire. This appropriative vision is neither unprecedented, echoing the frontier myths of the United States’ early settler colonial expansions across the North American continent and into the Pacific, nor wholly inconsistent with the United States’ long-term policy positions regarding the value and vitality of extraplanetary science and exploration. Nevertheless, as the nation endeavors to pave a subsidized way to the stars for its billionaire technocrats, aptly termed “space barons” by the political scientist Christian Davenport (2018), it must also be considered how the nation specifically mobilizes this imagination in our current day. As the United States revisits and relaunders the tropes of a “Manifest Destiny,” historically wielded as justification for the genocide and subjugation of indigenous peoples, it further develops material mechanisms of violent settler colonialism within the context of outer space–what the geographer Deondre Smiles terms “the settler logics of outer space” (2020).

However, it is an error to believe that such imperialist fantasies and settler colonial technologies are the only and inevitable means for engaging with the extraplanetary. Indeed, this special session endeavors to illuminate complex imbrications between political discourse and space technology, between current space policy and settler colonial investments. It insists on identifying the various ways in which speculative fictions and anti/colonial visions of outer space might offer glimpses into the settler logics administered upon the cosmos, as well as alternative ways of conceiving human relationships with extraplanetary worlds. With these themes in mind, this panel will assemble a series of methods for confronting, dissolving, and resisting alloyed narratives of colonialism and space exploration, in part through a turn to the alternative possibilities modeled by collective, indigenous knowledge-production and Afrofuturist science fiction.

To adequately treat the necessarily cross-disciplinary and cross-period scope of this special session and provoke fruitful discussion, we have selected four panelists, instructed to present 10-minute papers. These panelists are well-equipped to address topics of colonial history and anticolonial potential from a variety of situated positions, educational backgrounds, and career standings, as junior and senior scholars with expertise in the study of indigenous geographies, gender theory, and astronomy. Deondre Smiles sets the initial, imminent stakes for the session, proposing the charter for an Anishinaabeg Space Agency, a model of space exploration defined not by a will to dominate and exploit celestial bodies but by a collective production of knowledge intimately entwined with their original homelands. The two subsequent papers trace the historical roots of colonialist, fascist, and commercial approaches to outer space, unfolding the political commitments behind contemporary aesthetic and legal descriptions of the non-terrestrial. Nicholas Cohn situates the literary afterlife of eugenicist visualizations of Martian landscapes and waterways within the nineteenth-century ascent of North American popular astronomy and fin de siecle theories of biological degeneration, emphasizing the need for a reappraisal of aqueous aesthetics in science fiction. Frank Tavares turns to the WWII and Cold War origins of early rocketry programs to investigate how similar practices of adaptation and obscuration have been employed to misrepresent the relationship between contemporary visions of a lunar economy and space research’s complicity in the workings of the United States’ military-industrial complex. To close the formal segment of the session, Smaran Dayal will offer a paper investigating how Afrofuturist authors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, including Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and N.K. Jemisin, sketch non-coercive and non-colonial methods for imagining the exoplanet.