Estranging Allegory through Worldbuilding in the Works of N.K. Jemisin

Abstract

N.K. Jemisin has become an important voice in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers, using her storyworlds to reflect on the world through a post-colonial lens that reveals and critiques issues of race, racism, white supremacy, and other aspects of destructive whiteness. Science fiction and fantasy are literatures of estrangement, and they use that framework to interrogate complicated ideas and issues. The worldbuilding of these genres is essential to this process, providing the mechanism to create unfamiliar conditions and circumstances that facilitate estrangement and defamiliarization. Worldbuilding is a collaborative process between the author and the reader, with the author’s worldbuilding informing how the reader subsequently recreates the imagined world. Building on previous scholarship that explores the allegorical nature of Jemisin’s works and defamiliarization in her writing, I propose that a key aspect of Jemisin’s worldbuilding is that she takes the critical elements of the allegory or theme and builds them each into the storyworld independent of each other. Estranging the allegory in the storyworld this way creates space between the elements in the reader’s worldbuilding that reinforces defamiliarization, and can circumvent alienating associations from the real-world context. Ultimately, reconciling the estranged allegory may increase understanding of and empathy for experiences outside of their own in the reader. This thesis examines how the themes in two of Jemisin’s novels, The Fifth Season and The City We Became, are estranged and defamiliarized through the worldbuilding, with an interest in how the key elements of the thematic allegory are estranged from one another and defamiliarized independently in the text, and how the level of estrangement of the storyworld affects how this dynamic.