From Afrofuturism to afrofuturism

Abstract

151 BOOKS IN REVIEW often supported the status quo, reaffirming certain conservative notions of the period—a balancing act that perhaps facilitated its continued popularity with audiences. A key theme across the book is the way in which Serling was forced to walk a fine line between his creative vision and the commercial imperatives of network television, often railing against the advertisers while simultaneously being required to promote their products. In this, Grant offers an insightful examination of the complexities of producing speculative fiction for television and shows how Serling had to negotiate his own middle ground between light and shadow. The book is enriched by a vast amount of production detail that firmly grounds the discussion within the show’s production history. Grant’s analysis is rich and convincing, and one of the strengths of this book across all the chapters is his ability to analyze multiple episodes in depth but without sacrificing the breadth of the series. Each chapter covers a great deal of ground and one comes away from the book with a clear sense of the richness, diversity, and complexity of the show, as well as of some of its inherent contradictions. Notably for the MILESTONE series, the book conveys how and why The Twilight Zone remains a landmark series for the science-fiction and television fan and scholar. As such the book provides an excellent overview of The Twilight Zone and its place in television past and present.—Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton From Afrofuturism to afrofuturism. Isiah Lavender III. Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. Ohio State UP, NEW SUNS: RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN THE SPECULATIVE, 2019. xi+230 pp. $29.95 pbk. Afrofuturism is to sf studies today what cyberpunk and feminist sf were to the field in the 1990s and early 2000s, a period in which the English departments which many in the field called home had finally begun to embrace sf studies and the field subsequently flourished through critical works that engaged feminism, queer studies, postmodernism, posthumanism, and the growing excitement of the digital. While literary and cultural studies scholars, especially in American Studies, were turning to multicultural, ethnic, and Black literature in significant numbers, however, sf studies remained pretty firmly white in its focus. Indeed, the mainstream of the genre we study had yet to embrace any significant number of writers of color. Though the occasional luminary of Black sf—such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Nalo Hopkinson—was regularly recognized as among “the greats,” they were rarely privileged with space in critical venues (Science Fiction Studies, always a leader in the field, did publish several articles on writers of color throughout the 1990s and 2000s). Carl Freedman’s inclusion of Delany’s Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984) in his groundbreaking Marxist study of sf, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), was the first time a major work of sf scholarship paid any such attention to Black sf. In the following years, works such as Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James’s The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003), De Witt 152 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Douglas Kilgore’s Astrofuturism (2003), Patricia Kerslake’s Empire and Science Fiction (2007), Adilifu Nama’s Black Space (2008), John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), and the occasional edited collection began to shape more nuanced conversations about race in sf. The efforts of scholars were paired with the efforts of authors and anthologizers such as Sheree Renée Thomas, who put together Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora in 2001 and a sequel in 2005. The snowballing of work on race in science fiction exploded in the last ten years, thanks in large part to new cohorts of Black scholars and scholars of color entering the professoriate in larger numbers after decades of (still ongoing) struggles against inequality in the academy. Enter Isaiah Lavender III, a scholar whose first monograph, Race in American Science Fiction (2011), defined a generation of scholarship on race in sf. Lavender’s book offered readings of sf by white and Black writers alike to look at the construction...