The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination

Abstract

For certain groups, particularly the disprivileged, the apocalypse is not something to anticipate and fear—an imagined future event—but something that has already happened or continues to happen. In recent living memory, for example, disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and earthquakes in Haiti in 2010 and 2021 have exacerbated existing inequalities in parts of the USA and the Caribbean. Black people have also been disproportionately affected by the painful history of exploitation and violence represented by the apocalyptic events of the Middle Passage, slavery, and the plantation economy. The collective traumatic legacy that results is addressed in the Black women’s postapocalyptic fiction discussed in Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s book. Lavon Montgomery argues that history is part of the future. There cannot be a revision and reappraisal of the past without incorporation of it but, that must involve a challenge to the standard accounts of history offered by the powerful. In the contexts...