"It Was All So White": Mat Johnson's Afrofuturist Retelling of Poe

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article tackles the subgenre of lost race tales embedded in both SF and Afrofuturism megatexts by juxtaposing Edgar Allan Poe's only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), with Mat Johnson's Afrofuturist retelling of Poe's novel in Pym (2011), linked through the secondary character of Dirk Peters, whose ambiguous Native American heritage in Poe's novel is made over by Johnson into an unambiguous colored man. That is to say, Johnson re-envisions Dirk Peters, racially ambiguous in Poe's novel, as Native American and something White, as a White-passing colored man. This powerful intertextual moment—this transformation of skin color—forms the crux of my argument as Johnson interrogates the meaning of race in his satirical neo-slave narrative. To accomplish this Afrofuturist reckoning for Poe, I examine the deep past of a Blackness embedded in our national literature—marked by dislocation, trauma, and White supremacy—to move forward into a different future.