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As a genre, speculative fiction1 engages with many of the premises that underlie colonialism and imperial projects. Often, spec-fic scenarios replicate the same principles and dynamics of invasion and extermination/domination that have historically marked colonial expansions. John Rieder explores how much of early science fiction is constructed upon fantasies of appropriation, which include the location of the Indigenous or racialized other in marginalized contexts (often regarded as exotic and underdeveloped), the exploitation of resources, or the adoption of the noble savage figure (Rieder 34-60). Parallel to this pervasiveness of colonial discourses in spec-fic, there have been relatively few mainstream stories that engage significantly with non-European ethnicities. Elizabeth Leonard notes that sf deals with racial tension by ignoring it. In many books the characters race is either not mentioned and probably assumed to be white or, if mentioned, is irrelevant to the events of the story and functions only as an additional descriptor (254). This is, of course, not only a problem of the content of spec-fic works, but of the publishing industry itself, as it is still largely dominated by white, male authors. This literary situation is nevertheless gradually changing as more black and Indigenous writers turn to the genre of speculative fiction. Nalo Hopkinson belongs to a tradition of black specfic writers who, though still a minority, have produced a strong and celebrated body of work. This tradition includes writers such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Charles Saunders, as well as more recently published writers of African descent, Shawl. Indeed, Hopkinsons and Uppender Mehan's collection of short stories by multi-ethnic writers, So Long Been Dreaming (2004), was the first to be self-defined as "postcolonial science fiction and fantasy," confirming, as Hopkinson has declared, that "a speculative literature from a culture that has been on the receiving end of the colonization glorified in some sf could be a compelling body of writing" (Rutledge 591).
Postcolonialism and speculative fiction thus overlap in significant ways and bringing them together constitutes a productive critical exercise. In this article, I focus on Hopkinsons The Salt Roads (2003) to argue that, through narrative approaches such as the focus on the black female body and the use of the Afro-Caribbean supernatural, two main historical and cultural re-examinations can be discerned....