Speculative Fiction and the Limits of the White Imagination: Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel

A few months ago I wrote about Deb Olin Unferth’s Earth 7, and how it felt in some ways less focused and, consequently, less galvanizing than her previous novel Barn 8, which dramatically altered both my political consciousness and my perception of what a novel should be. While reading, I struggled at first to understand why Earth 7 was falling flat for me, but gradually came to realize it was the result of its sort of vague gesturing toward a future apocalyptic world, where people struggle for survival after—what? After who did what? We’re never told. By focusing tightly on just a few characters—the scientist, her restless daughter, the daughter’s genetically modified girlfriend (all of whom are presumably White)—Unferth is not required at any point to explain what institutions or social ills are responsible for the downfall of society as we know it. We’re dropped into a world that has already gone from on fire to smoldering to burned out.

Shortly thereafter I read another book by an(other White) author I’ve long esteemed, Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party, published in September. Mandel’s apocalyptic masterpiece Station Eleven (2014) came to me at a time when I was depressed and unsure of my place in the world, and jaded about books and writing (or more accurately the machinery of academia, which trebuchets young creative writing talent directly into the meat grinder of traditional Big Five publishing). It took me a while after leaving my MFA program to realize that I could love books, as a job even, while avoiding the often gruesome conveyor belt of commercial lit. That’s a melodramatic way of saying I hadn’t read a good book in a while when I encountered Station Eleven.

The novel follows a troupe of actors called the Traveling Symphony who are performing Shakespeare at various settlements across an apocalyptic wasteland that used to be the Great Lakes region of the United States. It gained traction again in 2020 because it takes place after a global pandemic and people were hungry for feel-good versions of our horrifying reality as Covid-19 was poised to change the way we live forever.

All of the main characters in Station Eleven are presumably White, except for Jeevan Chaudhary and his brother Frank, whose Indian American heritage is basically only represented on the page via their names, and if I’m remembering correctly, so are most if not all of the characters in Mandel’s subsequent releases The Glass Hotel (2020) and Sea of Tranquility (2022), which with Station Eleven make up a loose series. Exit Party weaves in a few references to these other books but is otherwise distinct. What is also distinct about Exit Party is that many of its characters are identified as, or can be presumed to be, people of color. These characters have names like Kareem and Eduardo and Ibari. I have to assume sometime after 2022, Mandel realized that any kind of imagined future where White people are still the racial majority in the United States is inherently unrealistic. But you can’t, as a White author, just insert a bunch of Black and brown characters into your novel and call it a day.

In an interview with The Rumpus in 2020, Mandel was asked whether the adaptation of Station Eleven for television had any effect on her writing, and she replied:

“The main way it impacts my writing is that I’m careful not to specify a character’s race unless there’s some reason why that’s relevant. Which there almost never is for the work I’m doing. I want the casting to be open for any actor or actress.”

While this sounds very innocuous in an I-don’t-see-color sort of way, it’s actually kind of shockingly obtuse when you unpack it. “Unless there’s some reason why that’s relevant”? If you’re writing a world in which characters’ races are totally irrelevant, you’re writing a world where only one race of people exists, or matters. I can’t think of a single setting in which a character’s race would actually be irrelevant. It is possible she feels differently about this subject now, as she is more explicit about identifying race/ethnic heritage in Exit Party, but she seems to have forgotten the “reason why that’s relevant” part, as this novel still imagines a world where race is never discussed as a phenomenon that affects a character, their interactions with others, or their relationship with the world around them and with the state. This is all the more unlikely when one considers that the events of the book begin in 2030, just four years from now. The characters in this book were adults on 9/11 and they have no racial consciousness.

In Exit Party, we see two alternate versions of the US—one in which a coup has split the country apart into individual autonomous zones, and another where the country remains unified but it is a surveillance state akin to East Germany in the era of the Stasi. Unless we are meant to assume these scenarios emerged from an entirely fictional past and present (and we’re not, because 9/11 is mentioned in passing, totally isolated from its political context), one imagines White supremacy would have to be in some way existent in relation to the problems of this imagined future—i.e., surely in a surveillance state version of the US (are you sure this is fictional, har har) the surveillance would be applied more heavily to some citizens than others. And if the US were to break apart into various regional factions, you better believe some of those factions would be breaking out the phrenology calipers to establish their own superiority and at least a dozen would be flying the Confederate flag. Mandel’s unwillingness to engage with this reality is evident to an almost comical degree in a scene describing Ibari’s brief experience running guns and selling them to various militias:

“She learned their language and their fears. Protect the homeland, they said, and they understood the homeland to be Ohio, sectors having been lost to the Pittsburgh militias and to two cities that wanted to become city-states. Some of them felt this was just as well. Cultural differences was another line she heard often in the haze, delivered in a sarcastic tone but meant sincerely.”

The terms “cultural differences” and “protect the homeland” being applied to the differences between people from Ohio and Pittsburgh is amusing, don’t get me wrong, but in a remotely realistic version of a future United States, the “homeland” can be nothing other than Whiteness.

Given the trajectory of late-stage capitalism, I would also expect any future dystopia on par with the parallel universes in the novel would have emerged from, or would still be dealing with, the repercussions of the rich getting endlessly richer and the poor endlessly poorer. But we don’t see much of that either. There are people who are disenfranchised in both versions of the US Mandel conjures, but these are largely people who have run afoul of the Big Brother governmental apparatus and not people oppressed for their race or class. It goes without saying that some of the most crucial human rights issues of our present moment, such as disability and trans rights, are not mentioned at all.

In a more recent interview with NPR on the press tour for this book, Mandel drew a connection between the ICE raids in Minneapolis earlier this year and scenes in Exit Party in which people are abducted off the street by the secret police and never seen again. (To reiterate, in the book there is no suggestion that people of any particular race or origin are being targeted.) In these scenes, Mandel describes bystanders looking away as this happens, presumably to avoid angering the secret police agents and becoming targets themselves. But of course this isn’t what happens in Minneapolis (and in other cities) during ICE raids. People do not stand idly by and watch their neighbors getting kidnapped by the state. They fight back, even to their own detriment, every time. The worlds imagined by White speculative fiction authors are often an attempt to show a seedier side of humanity (through the lens of Whiteness) that isn’t even close to being an accurate representation of the various ways people really behave under pressure.

I actually do not mean to shit all over Emily St. John Mandel; she’s a skilled writer and I will probably always have a soft spot for her work in my heart. In many ways we are living in a very different world from the one we were in living in when the interview with The Rumpus was conducted and it’s very likely she wouldn’t say what she said then today. But her commentary about race, limited as it has been, and the way she uses racially diverse characters as leverage in Exit Party speaks to a wider conundrum that has plagued speculative fiction written by White American authors for decades and continues to: the future of the United States will undoubtedly be less White than the present or past, but these authors don’t know how to write non-White characters, how to imagine the evolution of racism and racial issues and the institutions that uphold racism in this country. And to give a little more grace to these authors—they are rewarded for doing exactly what they do by the publishing industry and punished for doing otherwise. Publishers want bland books neutered of any political content that could be divisive and they believe books with White characters or that are designed to appeal to a White audience (whatever they think that means) will be most profitable. It’s an antiquated, regressive industry and that is exactly why it’s failing pathetically in the 21^st century.

So what is the White speculative author to do? There is controversy around whether White authors have the authority to write from the perspectives of people of color, and it’s clearly unrealistic and unacceptable for a White author to write a novel meant to capture a society writ large that is composed entirely of White characters. Sure, it's undeniably risky to write non-White characters as a White person because what if you make a mistake and you are CANCELED ONLINE. But the solution here cannot be, as Mandel has done in Exit Party, to create characters who are not White and never acknowledge the institution of Whiteness. It is to BE A BETTER WRITER, and a more thoughtful and educated one. It is also risky to acknowledge in your writing the political realities of White supremacy, racism, and classism that will undoubtedly still exist in the future (particularly the future of about five years from now). BIPOC authors are more likely to take these risks for a number of reasons, and as a result they are and have been for decades producing some of the best, most dynamic work in speculative and science fiction.

But White writers have been permitted to avoid that risk for a long time, and rewarded for doing so. Risk aversion becomes ingrained in a cyclical manner, with the safest writers becoming darlings of their MFA programs, scouted by agents, and handed a fat stack of cash to write about a dystopian world populated entirely by Lena Dunhams.

Thus many White authors don’t want to do the work of learning how to write from perspectives radically different from their own. Because they can't envision any rewards for doing so, and because it’s a monumental and never-ending task, breaking from one’s inner White supremacist. But part of being a good writer is welcoming these challenges. And someone like Emily St. John Mandel, a well-established author with a publishing contract and generous advances, is in the best position to take risks and improve the landscape for other writers, especially writers of color who might not have the luxury of being apolitical. Roll up your sleeves Mandel, it's time to get to work.

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