Mad/Utopian/Prehistoric: Black Powers of Speculation

Abstract

Abstract Black life in the modern world makes incisive demands on the cultural politics of imaginative fiction as well as social movement rhetoric. Recent scholarship supplements the ongoing efflorescence of Afrofuturist art by reconstructing the history of speculative, utopian, and cautionary tales in Black writing. Isiah Lavender’s Afrofuturism Rising and Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia join a growing body of intellectual history prepared for the task of historicizing fantastic Black aesthetics. Sami Schalk’s more contemporary intervention, Bodyminds Reimagined, demonstrates the integral value of Black women’s speculative fiction to rethinking the role of dis/ability—conspicuously including the radical difference signified by “madness”—in the panoply of power relations that stand to be transformed by Black radical thought in action.