For more than twenty-five years, Andrea Hairston has been an active writer of plays, novels, essays, poems, and short stories. Many of these works use science fiction to present and explore the stories of people who have often been marginalized in mainstream society due to their gender, race, class, and disability. To date, her writing has received no critical examination. This thesis examines five of her works—three plays, a short story, and a novel—both as exemplars of contemporary science fiction and as components of an evolving “multicultural feminist science fiction aesthetic.” In addition, I look at her essays on science fiction and theatre as a guide to her own “spectral vision” as a writer, director, and teacher. An overview of her work as the artistic director of the feminist, community-outreach Chrysalis Theatre in Northampton, Massachusetts, demonstrates her commitment to an overall feminist approach to the arts.

A Visit to an Obscure Planet explores the effects of colonization on would-be colonizers and the potential colonized. The play addresses the question of what it means to be an “alien other” from these two different perspectives. Both explorers and aborigines see themselves as superior in many ways to the other. Misunderstandings over language, race, and religion provide points of comic contention throughout the play. The clash of purposes and values between the two “cultures” illustrates a long-standing conflict in cross-cultural relations as old, if not older than, the first European visits to the New World. Nominally blind to gender, race, age, and class, A Visit allows directors and actors the creative freedom to apply their understanding of culture clashes to the performance itself.