Vanishing bodies: 'race' and technology in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight robber

In her novel, Midnight robber, Nalo Hopkinson uses Afro-Caribbean folklore and magic in a futuristic setting to re-imagine stock science fiction spaces in a black Atlantic context. Hopkinson is among a small but growing group of Afro-Caribbean women writers of speculative fiction engaged in the political act of rewriting science fiction from the perspective of the marginal subject. This article will address Hopkinson's treatment of cyberspace, the spaceship and the penal colony, which become, when placed in the context of Middle Passage narratives, liminal sites in which the 'black' body disappears and language and memory are dislocated from their historical and cultural context. In the light of work by Paul Gilroy, it will show how Hopkinson projects the black Atlantic into cyberspace, where expanded discourses of technology allow metaphors of the black Atlantic to become deterritorialised and a more fluid model of racial and gendered identity to emerge.