Whole New Worlds

Abstract

For much of the history of speculative fiction, stories in this genre often erased the presence of people of African descent from their imaginary worlds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, works that feature the experiences of characters of African descent in artistic genres such as literature, film, and television or web series emerged on the speculative fiction scene. In this chapter, Allen Ahmed analyzes several narratives produced during this time, including Steven Barnes’s alternate history novels Lion’s Blood and Zulu Heart, Justina Ireland’s zombie tales Dread Nation and Deathless Divide, the Marvel superhero film Black Panther, and the Netflix series Always a Witch, to explore the storytelling techniques their creators use to rewrite the actual stories of Afrodiasporic people as speculative fiction. Drawing on critical race narratology, the chapter shows how these works treat Afrofuturist themes such as the fraught-filled relationship between Black people and technoculture in their reimaginations of Afrodiasporic pasts and presents and their visualizations of Black futures, arguing that they create “whole new worlds” that differ from those often presented in mainstream speculative fiction.