The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, a book that traces ideas about white nationalism through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Here, Carroll is joined in conversation with David M. Higgins.

Jordan S. Carroll is the author of Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). He received his PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and his first book won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. Carroll’s writing has appeared in American Literature, Post45, Twentieth-Century Literature, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and The Nation. He works as a writer and educator in the Pacific Northwest.

David M. Higgins (he/they) is associate professor of English and chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide, and a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. David is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2022 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award. He has also published a critical monograph examining Ann Leckie’s SF masterwork Ancillary Justice (2013), and his research has been published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, and Extrapolation. In the public sphere, David has been a featured speaker on NPR’s radio show On Point, and his literary journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Guardian. David serves as the second vice president for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

EPISODE REFERENCES:
James H. Madole

Richard B. Spencer

Dune (Frank Herbert)

The Iron Dream (Norman Spinrad)

Samuel Delany

Alain Badiou

Francis Parker Yockey / “destiny thinking”

“Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind” by Elisabeth Zerofsky, on Robert Paxton. New York Times Magazine.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)

Fredric Jameson

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

“Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

Reading the Obscene

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