"The Ontology of the Ship: Celestial Ecologies in Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Octavia Butler’s Dawn"
In 2021, after traveling to space for 11 minutes, Jeff Bezos declared at a press conference that “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.”[1] Outer space, in current popular discourse—from films and televisual depictions to real-life initiatives such as those spearheaded by Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson—is the site of a range of narratives about the environment, about human “evolution,” and about exploration. One such narrative suggests that the earth will soon be uninhabitable and so we must find another planet to colonize; here, Bezos reverses that formulation to suggest that we pollute space to preserve earth’s beauty and habitability. But this solution to our ecological problems suggests that space itself is not ecological and is somewhat separate from nature, already a barren wasteland.
This essay undermines the tendency to view outer space as dead and empty by demonstrating that this category of thinking about the celestial elsewhere aligns with the Enlightenment split of man from nature articulated by Francis Bacon and others, who also theorized nature as inanimate and unalive in ways that ushered in the ethos of ecological destruction that has characterized Western society ever since.[2] I suggest in this essay that the contemporary corporate space race is repetitionary of not only the ideology of the West relative to the natural world but that the consequences of such initiatives are likely to be destructive of the broader ecology—which, in my formulation includes outer space—in much the same way it has been on earth.
This fractured Enlightenment ecological illogic also structures our assumptions about what space travel is and how it can be accomplished; generally, we assume that an encounter with the celestial elsewhere can only be achieved through the mechanical—technology, rockets, propulsion engineering, and the like. In this essay, I consider the work of two black writers, Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) and Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987), whose imagined encounters with the celestial elsewhere are rooted in an organic encounter with living beings. In both texts, the ships used by the aliens are alive—not mechanical vessels whose intended goal is to get us to outer space and can only be understood as opposing life given the environmental devastation they entail—but are instead living beings themselves that symbiotically support life for “itself/themselves” and for any beings that live or travel within its/their body. Both Thompson and Butler’s conceptions of outer space rely upon an ethos that is antithetical to the machine-centered technological obsession of the West, which subverts the broader anti-nature orientation of the West and suggests that even in the context of space exploration and/or contact, Earthlings must alter both their understanding and relationship to the natural world, which includes, rather than excludes, outer space itself.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-move-all-polluting-industry-into-space-blue-origin-2021-7
[2] I discuss this idea at length in Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture. (University Press of Mississippi, 2021).
Stefanie Dunning is an associate professor of English at Miami University of Ohio.