Wild seed: Africa and its many diasporas

Abstract

This paper engages with the epistemological assumptions of diaspora as it has been narrativised within North American discourses of Black identity formation. It will be argued that in light of the rapid growth of Black African migrant women populations in both the United States and Canada, and their second generation descendants over the past four decades, new frameworks for understanding Blackness are needed. The experiences of Black identity formation among these women in North America are particularly susceptible to exclusion within older and more dominant frameworks for narrativising histories of slavery, migration and Blackness. I will argue that Black feminist speculative fiction, with its history of subversion and reputation for unbound imagination, can be useful in addressing this exclusion. Thus, using Octavia Butler’s 1980 novel Wild seed as a case study, I will argue throughout this paper that Black feminist speculative fiction presents epistemological tools useful in exploring the limits of these older frameworks, while still drawing from them in order to create newer and/or more flexible epistemologies better suited to the gendered, ethnic and sexual differences within Black diasporic communities, especially those that have come about as a result of these newer migrations from Africa.