Tangible Black Joy and Beyond: An Interview with Isiah Lavender III

Abstract

Tangible Black Joy and Beyond: An Interview with Isiah Lavender III Shelby L. Crosby (bio), Terrence Tucker (bio), and Isiah Lavender III (bio) We are excited to interview Dr. Isiah Lavender III for this special issue of CLAJ. Dr. Lavender is one of the most prolific scholars of Afrofuturism of the last decade. His interest in race and science fiction, shown in 2014’s Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and 2017’s DisOrienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, has evolved into a significant interest in Afrofuturism, particularly in literature. His interest in Afrofuturism’s literary history and present contrasts Afrofuturism’s expansion into film, art, and music. Along with Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement and Literary Afrofuturism in Twenty-First Century (co-edited), his upcoming book Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson signals his interest in capturing and preserving the voices and experiences of some of the field’s most influential yet underappreciated voices. How do we define ourselves? How do others define us? These are the central questions that Isiah Lavender III answers in texts like Afrofuturism Rising and Literary Afrofuturism. Thinking about slave narratives as “laying bare a science-fictional American existence. Each of these black freedom fighters engenders the afrofuturist vista from antebellum America to the twenty-first century by creating a legacy of resistance.” It is this legacy of resistance, rooted in the “science-fictional American existence” that allows readers to understand the hope that lies within these narratives. Readers can also reimagine and redefine the notion of resistance in new terms, new words, and, perhaps, new worlds—new worlds that fugitive slaves had yet to imagine. As artists and scholars recover the voices and experiences that many have tried to erase, Lavender challenges us to consider that “Racism refuses to die even when the dead rise.” For him, the importance of Afrofuturism is not in happy endings or in easy solutions, but in the joy and possibility that lies in telling our own stories and continuing the search for the notions of freedom the fugitive slaves relentlessly pursued. 1. How far back can we trace the presence of Afrofuturism or Black Speculative Fiction in African American literature? Certainly, I think the presence of Afrofuturism can be seen in the spirituals and folktales prevalent in the black vernacular tradition of early America because songs and stories transported tired black bodies and black minds of the enslaved to more [End Page 175] hopeful places such as heaven. How could they not? For example, the spiritual “I Know Moon-Rise” engages outer space in evoking the moon and the stars, a physical actual heaven that Octavia E. Butler will extrapolate upon more than 200 years later in her great novel Parable of the Sower (1993), where the destiny of her imaginary religion, Earthseed, is to take root among the stars. Looking to the past to move into the future is surely Afrofuturist and absolutely related to the Akan concept of Sankofa first derived in Ghana. I do not think this concept occurred to the originator of the term Mark Dery when he invented the word in 1993 to frame a set of interviews with Samuel R. Delany Jr., Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose in the South Atlantic Quarterly. Dery did nominally have an African American future, technoculture, and prosthetic enhancement firmly in mind when he defined Afrofuturism, though that’s debatable since he used William Gibson’s orbital Rastas as an example. Delany brilliantly clapped back to this political error or cultural mis-step on Dery’s part with his skillful, even beautiful riff: You’ll forgive me if, as a black reader, I didn’t leap up to proclaim this passing presentation of a powerless and wholly nonoppositional set of black dropouts, by a Virginia-born white writer, as the coming of the black millennium in science fiction; but maybe that’s just a black thang…. (195) In short, Afrofuturism predates the founding of the United States from a skewed viewpoint even with the paradox of its being defined in the late twentieth century. I think the race of Dery himself has caused a bit of...