This chapter looks at the ways sf visions of the future published in the decades following World War II both challenge the dominant ideology of American exceptionalism – the notion that the United States is a single homogenous nation uniquely exempt from history – and the Program Era division between literary and genre fiction. Both Program Era realism and sf develop representations of the present. However, sf’s mirror is a distorting anamorphic one, presenting imaginary futures that help its readers cognize the contradictions, conflicts, and struggles that are always at work in any historical situation, and which naturalizing formulations such as American exceptionalism occlude. The chapter traces shifting practices of representing the future, beginning with 1950s dystopias, postapocalypses, and alternate histories through the radical visions of the New Wave and the new practices of postmodern cyberpunk and critical dystopia up to the recent wave of literary sf and climate change fiction.

When it comes to food and race, the connection is often one of identity: how the one comes to stand in for the other and vice versa. This chapter invites readers to theorize food and consumption in Asian American literature by attending to food, not as an expression of identity, but as that which profoundly destabilizes (and perhaps even dissolves) identity and by questioning the association between food as matter and race as matter. It focuses on the tropes of ingestion, farming, and environmental and human health in On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee’s most and least Asian American novel, as a way to meditate on the nature of racial/ethnic (im)materiality. By turning to the crises of food and ecology as sites that trouble the division between the human and the animal, the consumer and the consumed, Lee forces us to reconsider our easy assumptions about racial-ethnic identity and the corporeal integrity that presumably substantiates that identity.