Speculative fiction—whether hard science fiction or epic fantasy, gothic horror, alternative histories, supernatural adventure stories, or other types of “weird” genre fiction—has, since its inception, been marketed as tales by white men about white men. Never mind that the existence of Black women and nonbinary writers from Pauline Hopkins and Zora Neale Hurston all the way to Octavia E. Butler, Nisi Shawl, and Rivers Solomon highlight a trajectory of speculative writing that is at least a century long. Real speculative fiction has too often been deemed the white man’s burden-cum-neocolonial themes of Jules Verne, the Christian allegories of Narnia, or the Western liberal humanist galaxies of the first Star Trek tv series and Star Wars movies. Real speculative fiction was a product of the West and so focused on Western cultural anxieties and if they did include characters or cultures from the global majority, these were included in a reductive, myopic fashions, superficial window dressing that gave way to more pressing concerns. The same can hardly be said for Black femme speculative fiction, where writers from the Americas, Africa, and Europe have subverted and, in many ways, utterly transformed by the genre. Foundational giants such as Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and N.K. Jemisin eschew white Western narrative structures and masculinist moralities to move us away from a never-ending cyclical plot of bad technologies being defeated by good ones (the latter often melded with some form of white masculine superiority, be it “the Force” or other form of paranormal ability).
Contrary to popular belief, there has always been a vibrant streak of speculative fiction in the Afrodiasporic literary tradition, even before Butler became the first Black women to publish almost exclusively in the speculative. While their white male counterparts often trafficked in white supremacist, patriarchal, imperialist imaginings of the past and fantasies of the future, the tradition of Black femme speculative fiction has always had its own distinct parameters. As readers of Black femme speculative fiction, we are less often provided with antagonists and protagonists, and more often required to wrestle with complex and complicated characters who fail to fit neatly into the categories of good and evil, Nietzschean or otherwise. Instead, writers such as Butler, Hopkinson, Rivers Solomon, Nnedi Okorafor, Akwaeke Emezi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs are often crafting arguments and analyses that cannot be mapped neatly onto our existing ideologies as to what constitutes an “authentic” Black politics. To go even further, as the scholars in this volume show, the subtexts in these works often address issues we in the academy miss, assuming that only our fellow academics are engaged with and responding to questions of Black time, space, precarity, the posthuman, the Anthropocene, not to mention alternative ontological and epistemological structures that honor difference outside of hierarchical logics.
Recall when the late and great Barbara Christian shared her troubled reaction to the then-recent turn towards mapping (white) post-structuralist theories on to African American fiction. Why, Christian wondered, was this latest generation of scholars seeking answers to Black texts from white European men whose own grasp of race and gender was, at best, rather shaky? While excluding or censoring discourses is rarely an answer, Christian’s essay “The Race for Theory” remains salient in our current world as we again turn towards white male philosophers—most long dead—to help us think through this latest era of Black vulnerability, oppression, and survival. As these contributors show, questions often put to those with little knowledge—much less understanding—on how to navigate difference and diversity accurately and inclusively will not come close to generating the kinds of insights, arguments, methods, scripts, answers, and, yes, more questions, that radiate outward from Black femme speculative fiction.
In this special issue, our contributors, many of them emerging scholars themselves, show us how Black femme speculative fiction takes up questions of living and surviving climate change and global disaster, the ethics and the politics of care and reproduction, the challenge of the archive—and even the polyvalent educational role speculative fiction can play that far exceeds the boundaries of traditional fiction. With their own creative intellects, they aptly and memorably bring out how these writers of great imagination and foresight provide us not so much a way “forward,” as a means of existing in the “right now.” After all, the future is not some bordered spacetime that lies just before us, it is in the process of being shaped by us right here, right now.
Chamara Moore’s essay, “Through Their Eyes: The Visionary Promise of Queer Speculative Writing” begins with a quote from Walidah Imarisha from the introduction to the anthology Octavia’s Brood. In it, Imarisha asserts that those of us “from communities of collective trauma” are always already “science fiction walking around on two legs,” recalling, to us, the famous quote from Audre Lorde that “we”—again meaning those from communities of collective trauma—“were never meant to survive.” This is a fitting introduction to an essay that seeks to explore more deeply the possibilities, reach, impact, and applicability of “visionary fiction,” a term coined in the anthology Octavia’s Brood to denote a subgenre of the speculative category which, like so many global majority literature traditions, uses fiction to explore possibilities of living, resistance, surviving, and thriving. Taking up Saidiya Hartman’s call to explore and develop a methodology of “critical fabulation”—that is, to address the archival paucity on queer Black lives with carefully constructed narratives of existence—Moore engages with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ short story “Evidence” and Akwaeke Emezi’s novel PET to ask if engaging with Black speculative fiction through a “queer and trans lens” specifically might not provide us an expanded understanding of archive itself. Moore shows how these texts provide us with a changed understanding of archives but goes even further through their compelling analyses to conclude that “there is no limit to the possibility for Black speculative narratives that go even beyond visionary fiction, and no limit to Black speculative fiction itself as a genre in the hands of transformative and inspiring Black queer femme writers.”
Megan Finch introduces us to the “afropocene,” a word she coins to define Black writers’ engagement with the “Anthropocene,” a term used to indicate the undeniable global impact human activity itself has wrought on our earth and our dangerously warming future. In “River Solomon’s Earthseed novel: Missing Mothers of the Afropocene in An Unkindness of Ghosts,” Finch draws our attention to the unenviably unique status and afterlives white Western slavocracies imposed on the Black female through the infamous law of partus sequitur ventrem (“that which is born follows the womb”). As Finch shows, this self-serving legal equation also leads, of course, to the enslavers’ insatiable desire to own and possess all within and beyond their purview, human and object or, as Butler’s duology succinctly shows us, straight into a destructive and deranged parasitism. In meaningful contrast, Finch highlights the significance of Butler protagonist Lauren Olamina’s self-imposed hyperempathy, where her perception of another’s pain results in the sensation of pain within her own body. Although Butler never finished her Earthseed series, Finch contends that Rivers Solomon’s novel enriches the series’ legacy with concluding possibilities through the very figure of that Black mother—albeit with monumental caveats.
Kiana T. Murphy provides an important contribution to the emerging field of scholarship on N.K. Jemisin—whose Broken Earth trilogy achieved the unprecedented honor of winning a Hugo award for each volume—by looking at both her trilogy and the Far Sector graphic novel series to interrogate the juxtaposition of apocalyptic and girlhood temporalities these works bring together. “Black Girlhood and Apocalyptic Relativity: Catastrophe and the Fault Lines of History in the Work of N.K. Jemisin” commences with Broken Earth’s iconoclastic narrative that begins with the end of the world, thus neatly deconstructing one of the most iron-clad laws of fiction: the end, the total destruction of the world, is now a passage of time like any other. Murphy argues that Jemisin diversifies this reformulation of end-time by underscoring that an “apocalypse is a relative thing,” forcing the reader to consider how this ultimate event can be an almost random fact for those beings whose lives extend far beyond our human scale, and simply a challenging interval for the ancient relics that bear guidelines on enduring (rather than surviving) a cataclysm for as long as possible. Concluding with a reading of Jemisin’s Far Sector graphic series, which uses words and images in such a way that “readers must, first, contemplate the vantage point through which they see this imaginary world and its characters and, second, literally witness on the opening pages the seams this social world torn asunder,” Murphy asks us to consider how both works call attention to the “fault lines of history—the pressure points in which the very fractures of social worlds folds in on itself”.
Marquita R. Smith’s “Bearing the Burden of Posthuman Reproduction in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ and Wild Seed” pushes us to broaden our notions of what African American speculative fiction can look like, especially when it, as Butler does, confronts and then reorders a contemporary political stance grounded in our current interpretation of enslavement as a condition we still endure. As Smith puts it, these two works by Butler craft an “incisive speculation about the possibilities of Black reproductive power as a resistant mode of being that dares to exceed boundaries erected by narrowly defined structures of identity rooted in sexist and racist ideas.” Presenting us with “multisexed, gendered and posthuman” narrative speculations which, as Susana M. Morris has argued, “underscore the importance of transgressive manifestations of family and intimacy, epistemologies that ultimately present possibilities for our own decidedly unenchanted world,” Smith pushes us to understand Afrofeminist and US Black feminist futures as both terrifyingly grounded in the present while also in need of polyvalent analysis and interrogation. More specifically, Smith’s essay calls on us to engage with the “bodily grotesqueness” of Butler’s musings so that we understand the politics of care alongside the politics of reproduction, and the burden of responsibility that falls on all of us, wanted or not, when it comes to the symbiotic relationships that biology imposes—even as the current US Supreme Court attempts to structure that relationship as unidirectional, hierarchical, and “naturally” oppressive.
The originality of Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti quadrilogy (completed in 2019), stands out in a field already celebrated for its unique visions, constructions, and arguments. Nonetheless, by featuring a protagonist seeking an advanced degree in kinetic mathematics at Oomza Uni, the finest university in the galaxy, the eponymous protagonist in Binti is at once familiar and strange. In “Imagining Black STEMinist Care: Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Series,” Dana Murphy focuses on Binti’s diasporic journey as a member of the Himba, a denigrated tribe who have traditionally been shut out from consideration by the majority Khoush elite at Oomza. The preternaturally talented Binti’s cherished goal, to become a “master harmonizer,” Murphy argues, cannot be separated from her desire to represent, cherish, and advocate for her Himba culture, and paired together this offers up a guide to “STEMinist” care for femmes of color. Like Binti, they must still contend with educational institutions largely run by and for an elite at best tolerant of, but more often hostile to the idea of multicultural representation, both in terms of student bodies, pedagogical approaches and outcomes, and educational content and focus. Murphy’s essay also emphasizes that Okorafor’s series underscores the importance of the pursuit of knowledge as a means to bring minds and understanding together—and to challenge our own preconceptions on the value and meaning of other collective identities and knowledges. After all, Binti herself must contend with the prejudices apparent within her own oppressed Himba collective.
Perhaps one of the most important thought leaders for the current generation of queer, trans, and non-binary femmes of color is Alexis Pauline Gumbs, whose writings serve as both inspiration and cautionary measure for an undeniably precarious future. Olivia R. Polk’s “‘we created the future in form:’ M Archive's Black Lesbian Eco-Ethics for the End of the World” takes on what she terms as Gumbs’ “speculative poetics” and its engagement with esteemed Black feminist scholar M. Jacqui Alexander landmark monograph Pedagogies of Crossing. Polk argues that M Archive produces a palimpsest structure to knowing, a “simultaneous attunement to life across boundaries of linear time and hierarchical categories of human/non-human life” in order to provide an accurate and actionable Black ecological empiricism in the face of climate crisis and environmental disaster. Above all else, as this essay shows, Gumbs believes that it is memory with which we contend and turn to, drawing on Alexander’s own notion of sensation and the somatic, producing a polyvalent experience of time that cannily pushes against the whitewashing of history in which the same white technologies that have pulled us into disaster are miraculously (re)produced as the tools of our salvation.
Kristen Reynolds’ “The Great Book Rewritten: Black Speculative Temporalities Across the Archive in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death,” intervenes into our current debates on the recording of time and the politics of representation. This essay brings together the work of luminaries Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe with Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death to explore the ways in which Black femme thought troubles the traditional boundary lines between “time, fact and fiction.” Beginning with the ways both Sharpe, through “wake work,” and Hartman, through “critical fabulation,” both excavate and manifest Black femme lives in spite of and through a hostile archive, a place where Black female bodies simply do not matter except, in certain cases, as property, Reynolds then turns to ask us to consider archived history writ large. Rather than see irretrievable loss that at best can be partially amended or speculatively reconstituted, Okorafor’s novel presents us with the “living archive,” in which that which has been lost can be made present again. This living archive, Reynolds extrapolates, must be proactive, contending with a world in which human beings and human traditions will often seek to present their own crimes and criminal ideologies as history’s master-narrative. Okorafor’s novel, she shows, takes us directly into these conflicts to provide us with a method that is ever-vigilant and surprisingly, even counter-intuitively, capacious.
We move from the page to the stage in “If You Will Learn: The Pedagogy of Octavia’s Parables,” where Victoria Netanus Grubbs and Amelia Simone Herbert provide us with what may be in the first published essay on the Parable opera, with music and lyrics by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon. Looking at Butler’s work through the lens of “visionary fiction,” in which the text works to craft applicable practices and solutions to the crises that loom ahead (in this case global warming), Grubbs and Herbert broaden our view yet further by analyzing the multiple registers within which this opera is performed: vocal, instrumental, scene, staging, and, of course, the libretto. Although framed through a multimedia analysis, the focus of this essay is on the politics of “Black sound.” Using the Parable opera as an exemplary of how a work art can teach an audience, Grubbs and Herbert argue that the “practice of sounding and listening teaches us how to be together, how to synchronize and syncopate, how to improvise, and when and how to move.” In brief, we are shown the instructional qualities of Butler’s Parable can be broadened yet further without losing its pedagogical dynamic; indeed, paired with Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon renowned talents, Grubbs and Herbert opine, we are crossing an exciting new horizon for Black femme speculative fiction and its reach.
Sheree Renée Thomas has made an indelible mark on the evolution of science fiction and fantasy as an editor, novelist, poet, and critic, with works such as Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, Black Panther: Panther’s Rage, and Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, among many others. In “A New Era of Afrofuturism: An Interview with Sheree Renée Thomas,” Thomas talks with special issue co-editor Susana M. Morris about the trajectory of her storied career and what she sees as Black femme speculative fiction’s exciting possible, multivalent futures.
Taken together, this special issue of The Black Scholar breaks exciting new ground in the study of speculative fiction. Gone are the days where readers wonder, where are all the Black women and nonbinary writers of science fiction and fantasy? We know that the contemporary tradition builds on pioneering work that has often gone understudied. And that even if there is nothing new under sun, as Butler reminds us, there are always new suns.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Susana M. Morris
Susana M. Morris is Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching interests explore Black women’s relationships to Afrofuturism, the Anthropocene, and feminism. She is currently at work on a biography of Butler, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler.
Michelle M. Wright
Michelle M. Wright is an Emory College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English. Her research focuses on literary, cultural, philosophical, and political discourses on Blackness and Black identity in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Germanophone African Diaspora, from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries.