The Other Side of Time: Theorizing the Planetary South

Abstract

This entry into southern studies spins off a certain strain of black cultural criticism, especially as it concerns my engagement with black speculative text and what I call speculative race theory. The black speculative project—what Alondra Nelson and others roughly twenty years ago were terming afrofuturism, an idea that has since gained popularity as a branded aesthetic interest—is driven by literary, visual, musical, and various other intellectual work that evidences a dynamic intersection of race, space, time, and newer technologies. Also prominent in much of this text is a sequence of tropes common to post-Souls cultural production, particularly narratives of containment and flight coupled with representations of selected subjectivities as more provisional than guaranteed. Al Green's tune “Gotta Find a New World” comes to mind as a poignant escapist critique, and Syreeta Wright's “Black Maybe” serves as a haunting inventory of tense potentialities. In these instances the futurist sentiment is present, but the expected tech might be slightly latent. Many of these anticipations—relatively successful or not—are launched from the south, from a south, or from a southern idea. This set of remarks is as much a black speculative venture as it is a southernist exercise. Or perhaps it is the one in theory because it is in fact the other.