African American Science Fiction Research Articles

Reversing the Middle Passage: The Afrofuturist Aesthetic of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Reversing the Middle Passage: The Afrofuturist Aesthetic of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon Ousseynou B. Traore (bio) Before looking at Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and how it reflects Afrofuturism, it may be helpful first to define that concept itself. According to Alex Zamalin, “[Afrofuturism] has long been associated with science fiction and technology in the future, replete with robots and supercomputers” (10). While there are no robots and supercomputers in Song of Solomon, there is plenty about the past, the future, and their complex back-and-forth interactions. Ytasha L. Womack offers the following: Whether through literature, visual arts, music, or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturism redefines culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework of critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total re-envisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques. (9, my emphasis) Womack’s definition has the advantage of being deeply rooted in debates and theories that demarcate the recognizably Afrocentric orientation and also the African and African Diaspora myths, beliefs systems, and traditions of spirituality and magic that inform the aesthetic of Song of Solomon. On the other hand, science fiction and technology, as generally understood, admittedly do not play much of a role in the novel. However, in his essay “Black to the Future,” African-American science fiction writer Walter Mosley states: that “Any book that offers an alternative account for the way things are catches my attention. . . . This is because I believe that the world we live in is so much larger, has so many more possibilities, than our simple sciences describe” (405). Mosley is critical of the limitations of what he calls “our simple sciences”—perhaps meaning Western or Eurocentric ones—and instead promotes an “alternative account,” science fiction, for the way that things in a global world are “so much larger” than the Eurocentric West. Mosley then goes on to list a few major voices in the mainstream of black speculative and science fiction, such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Steven Barnes, and concludes: “There are also flashes of the genre in such respected writers as Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell” (406). Womack and Mosley thus confirm and complement each other’s critical thought and open the way for a variety of reflections. Building on the foundation provided by these two critics, I propose to examine what Mosley calls “flashes of [End Page 122] the genre” in Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which I would describe as exemplifying an “Afromythic” literary mode within the global theory of Afrofuturism. In Song of Solomon, Pilate is the ancestor. For Morrison, “the concept of the ancestor is not necessarily as a parent but as an abiding, interested, benevolent, guiding presence that is yours and is concerned about you” (Davis 227). Pilate embodies a huge library of West and West-Central African cultures that reflect on the past, the present, and the future; she arrives in Michigan with a green tarpaulin bag containing the skeletal remains of her murdered father and refers to it as her “inheritance” (97; 163–64). But Pilate is also the central bearer of the concept of Afrofuturism in Song of Solomon as she becomes its principal activating force that governs Mr. Smith’s flight at the beginning of the novel as well as Milkman’s soaring jump on Solomon’s Leap at the end. Her fantastic “self-birth” and lack of a navel mark her as one not born of a human being but self-created or created by forces beyond human knowledge. Nevertheless, Afrofuturism as a speculative process in this novel does not involve what is usually described as science fiction and does not depend on Western technology or science. Rather, it is activated by creative African knowledge and memory systems, especially the myth of “Flying Africans” who flew back to Africa as a form of resistance to slavery and a way of reversing the Middle Passage and its aftermath. Two philosophical expressions or models from the African experience come to mind. One...

The Strong Binti in Nnedi Okorafor’s African American Science Fiction

By looking carefully at the history of science fiction, we can notice that African American authors have been excluded from the scene for a long time due to the “whiteness” of the genre in terms of writing and publication. In addition to racism, sexism persists in the science fiction community. Hence, marginalized black women writers of science fiction try to include more black women characters in their literary works. Through Binti, Binti: Home, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor focuses on the experience of being black and woman in a technological society of the future. This study discusses how Okorafor provides sharp comments on the lives of black women in America in terms of “race” and “gender.” She challenges the stereotypical image of the black woman as “other” through the subversion of white norms and traditions. In this analysis, we use “Afrofuturism” and “black feminism” as a theoretical framework since “Afrofuturism” tackles African American issues related to twentieth-century technoculture, and “black feminism” deals with black women empowerment. The major character, Binti, proves that she deserves to reach a higher position as an empowered girl of the future, which gives her self-confidence to be autonomous and to have control over her own life.

“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell

CLA JOURNAL 25 “Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell Trent Masiki The Field Negro’s Lament In his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X tells a parable about the house Negro and the field Negro, two male slaves who hold opposing views on the merits of escaping their life in racial bondage. Paralyzed by the creature comforts of his relative privilege, the house Negro is satisfied with the status quo. When approached with the idea of running away, the house Negro balks, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” Fearing neither uncertainty nor the unknown, the field Negro replies, “Any place is better than here” (Malcolm X 11).The field Negro’s lament epitomizes how African Americans have, from the nineteenth century to the present, theorized and practiced emigration as a response to US racism and racial terror. Because they demonstrated the capacity to imagine and effect a liberated future for themselves, fugitive-minded slaves like the allegorical field Negro were, loosely speaking, afrofuturists. In his 1993 article “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” Mark Dery coined the term afrofuturism,1 defining it as an aesthetic mode of expression that focuses on African Americans and their relationship to advanced science and technology in the near or distant future (Dery 180). Since the 1990s, afrofuturism gained a host of proponents in literary and cultural studies because it advances the idea that African American speculative culture should promote African American social, political, and cultural agency. Scholars and writers like Alondra Nelson, Sheree R. Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Reynaldo Anderson, Kodwo Eshun, and Jeffery Allen Tucker were key in promoting the critical study of speculative literature by writers of African descent and defining afrofuturism as a Pan-African aesthetic rather than an exclusively African American one.2 Although afrofuturism is ethnocentric in its content, it is racially ecumenical in its authorship. Just as anyone can sing the blues, play 1 “Black to the Future” was first published in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 4, 1993. For a twenty-five year scholarly retrospective on afrofuturism, see Barber et al. 2 Each of these scholars and writers has written seminal texts about afrofuturism and African American science fiction, see Nelson; Thomas; Hopkinson and Nelson; Anderson and Jones; Anderson; Eshun; Tucker. 26 CLA JOURNAL Trent Masiki jazz, or perform hip hop dance, Dery suggests that anyone, regardless of race, can produce an afrofuturist text.3 Afrofuturism’s ethnoracial pluralism is essential to its efficacy as an antiracist cultural technology, argues literary scholar DeWitt D. Kilgore. Afrofuturism, contends Kilgore, “can be viewed as less a marker of black authenticity and more of a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unconscious assumptions about which histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we might imagine” (“Afrofuturism” 564). On one hand, afrofuturism’s racial pluralism poses the threat that speculative literature and media about people of African descent will be produced by people who have no existential investment in the history and condition of being a person of African descent. On the other hand, afrofuturism’s pluralism encourages all people, regardless of their race, to consume speculative literature, film, music, and art that centers and/or features people of African descent.4 The rich tension between afrofuturism’s ethnocentrism and its racial pluralism invites one to analyze understudied racial themes in Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) and Derrick A. Bell’s “The Space Traders” (1992). Since 2003, scholars in African American literary studies have been reinvestigating “Way in the Middle of the Air” and “The Space Traders” because these stories directly address science fiction’s evasion of the history of slavery, segregation, and racial terror in the US. In his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, André M. Carrington notes that Bradbury is a significant science fiction writer because he explicitly engages racial...

Martin R. Delany’s Speculative Fiction and the Nineteenth-Century Economy of Slave Conspiracy

Martin R. Delany’s Speculative Fiction and the Nineteenth-Century Economy of Slave Conspiracy Jennifer C. Brittan (bio) It has become commonplace for histories of African American science fiction to cite Martin R. Delany’s antebellum novel Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba as this tradition’s point of origin.1 For Britt Rusert, Delany’s interest in the microscope and the novel’s attention to astronomy create “rich imaginative terrain for speculations on freedom and world making.”2 Identifying this first American novel of black uprising as speculative fiction requires only basic familiarity with the title character and plot.3 Freeborn in Cuba but captured into slavery, Blake travels from Mississippi to Havana to lead the slave South in a conspiracy on the scale of the hemisphere. Just this bare outline establishes Blake as resolutely fictional. To begin, we might wonder how Delany, an outspoken critic of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, approached the creation of his rebel slave. Blake was this prolific writer’s only work of fiction, and readers have tended to identify Delany’s intention and attitude as functionalist. Most recently, Jerome McGann describes Delany as having “a focused purpose” in writing Blake, namely, “to bring about actual social change.”4 This view obscures the importance of fiction as a central focus of the novel. Looking to Delany’s interest in fiction as both subject matter and strategy clarifies how the realist novel and the work of speculative fiction overlap. For decades, critical interest in Blake focused on its realism, paying particular attention to the way the novel maps the transnational economics of slavery. Making the commercial world of the United States visible meant substituting a discrete national body for a diffuse geography stretching across the plantation South. What results, in Blake, is an anamorphic nation that comes into focus from the vantage point of Cuba, where Southern [End Page 79] and Northern interests intersect. One of the jobs of the realist novel is to make existing social worlds legible, and with Blake, published serially between 1859 and 1862, Delany shows a documentary concern for recording his own unfolding moment, tracing the close ties between antebellum expansionism, the illegal international slave trade, and the U.S. economy at large.5 As McGann puts it, “No work of American fiction proposed a more ambitious investigation of the history and vicious social conditions that characterized the emergent American Empire in the nineteenth century.”6 Delany borrows plot details from slave narratives and inserts his fictional story into a factual world of thick historical detail, frequently referring to events, places, and people.7 However, the inventions and anachronisms of the second half of the novel produce the kind of alternative history we associate with speculative fiction. It’s also here that the novel shows persistent interest in the speculative economy of slavery and the practice of betting on imagined futures. In addition to populating Blake with a catalogue of social types with stakes in the slave economy, Delany brings together two understandings of black futures: one in which slaves and slavery are imbricated in the speculative futurity of financial markets and one in which a hemispheric slave uprising takes the place of the American Civil War.8 Deidre Lynch remarks of the early realist novel that “characterization was valued for its usefulness to readers and writers who found themselves dwelling in a new commercial world, one altered by new trade routes and new forms of credit and full of strange commodities.”9 Strange commodities indeed who “found themselves dwelling” in Delany’s antebellum America, defined not just by human property but the attendant financial instruments of an expanding empire. As part of this novel’s documentary (or realist) impulse, Delany gives us the stock villain of the slave speculator and (more unusually) the stock market. Perhaps most surprisingly, he links black conspiracy fictions to finance capital. As yet undiscussed by critics, Blake’s attention to the speculative economy of slavery increases as the plot moves to Cuba, object of Southern expansionist ambition and key site of the illegal international slave trade...

Memory and Resistance: Doro’s Empire, Mary’s Rebellion, and Anyanwu as Lieu de Mémoire in Octavia E. Butler’s Mind of My Mind and Wild Seed

Can we create a liberated future without an understanding of our past? The role of history and memory in creating a liberated future are explored in many of African-American science fiction author ...

Post-Racial, Post-Apocalyptic Love: Octavia Butler as Political Theologian

The African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler (1947–2006) wrote explicitly about the relationship between religion and politics in her books Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). On the surface, Butler dramatizes the catastrophes that she anticipates will result from an alignment between American evangelicalism and neoliberalism, including climate change, mass incarceration, totalitarian politics, and corporate capture of political institutions. In her pair of novels, Butler proposes New Age spirituality aligned with community-based, ecology-minded politics as a necessary response. I argue that Butler's attempt to make a literary intervention in political theological critique ultimately fails because it grows out of unacknowledged commitments to the same neoliberal cultural forces that it ostensibly rejects. This failure is particularly evident when we focus on how race and love are represented in Butler's work.

27. Edwards, Elisa. 2011. Race, aliens, and the U.S. government in African American science fiction

Article 27. Edwards, Elisa. 2011. Race, aliens, and the U.S. government in African American science fiction was published on December 1, 2011 in the journal English and American Studies in German (volume 2011, issue 1).

Negotiating Genre and Captivity: Octavia Butler's Survivor

Negotiating Genre and CaptivityOctavia Butler's Survivor Maria Holmgren Troy (bio) Throughout her oeuvre, African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler has has focused her fiction on alternative family constellations, many of which have included extra-terrestrial aliens. In some of her stories, the figure of the orphan plays a leading role.1 One of these orphans is Alanna in Survivor (1978), who grows up as a wild child outside civilization on a future Earth. The story of Alanna's life as a teenager and young adult is one of adoption, negotiation, and adaptation. Like quite a few of Butler's protagonists, she has to deal with the repercussions of a mixed heritage and of being a woman of color in an intolerant, patriarchal community. There is also a mixture and negotiation of genres in Survivor: although it is clearly a science-fiction novel that both uses and revises major themes of that genre, I will show that the novel also engages with the genre of the Indian captivity narrative.2 I will suggest that Butler employs the orphan of color as a figure of difference as she draws on these genres, which have traditionally featured white protagonists and addressed white audiences. Indeed, Butler's novel and protagonist demonstrate the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of the captivity narrative as a carrier of cultural memory. As Jan Assmann has observed, cultural memory is "made visible in signs, symbols, images, texts, and rituals" (95). It forms the basis of, for instance, communal and national belonging and can have a bonding and even normative function. Written texts in particular open up new possibilities for cultural memory, since what is written down can be stored. Thus, the written text can serve both to perpetuate memory, to canonize it, and to change and challenge it, as different parts of a text can be activated by different readers and writers over time.3 In the latter sense, writing works as a "locus of latency" for cultural memory (Assmann 98). The Indian captivity narrative is a particularly interesting case in terms of American cultural memory; it has circulated for different purposes and in different forms since the seventeenth century, and, as Frances Roe Kestler observes, "the Indian captivity narrative forms a vital segment of American literature today, not only for its unique position as a separate genre, native in origin, but also for its influence on other types of writing as well as on our National culture" (xiii). Among other things, the captivity narrative has generically functioned as spiritual allegory, political propaganda, sensational adventure literature, and ethnological and historical account.4 The theme of Indian captivity also became important to American poets, playwrights, and novelists in the nineteenth century, as a national literature was shaped, and there are traces of the captivity narrative in sentimental, gothic, and historical fiction (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 37–38). Apart from its occurrence in different kinds of written accounts, the captivity narrative [End Page 1116] has spawned folkloristic tales, ballads, and legends (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 176). In the twentieth century, the theme of Indian captivity was used in films and TV series, and the structure and imagery of the narrative have been used to shape not only adventure stories in most if not all popular fiction genres (Slotkin 25), but also accounts such as hostage narratives and narratives of alien abductions (Panay; Scott; Sturma). Richard Slotkin has argued that the captivity myth is integral to what he calls the frontier myth. This myth is central to a specifically American ideology and identity, configured as white and Christian in opposition to Indian and savage, and it figures in a large number of different cultural and political contexts throughout American history. Slotkin uses the term "myth" in the sense of a story from a society's history that "through persistent usage" gains "the power of symbolizing that society's ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all of the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain" (5). He states that through frequent retellings and deployments as a source of interpretive metaphors, the original mythic story is increasingly conventionalized and abstracted until it is reduced to a deeply encoded and resonant...

Remembering Dr. Gloria Harper Dickinson (1947-2009)

Dr. Gloria Harper Dickinson, a former president, member of the executive council, and leading figure in the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), head of African American Studies at the College of Jersey, and International Regional Director of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, died of breast cancer on 18 January 2009. Born in Queens, York, on 5 August 1947, she graduated from Hunter High School in York City, received her B.A. in history from City College of York, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in African Studies from Howard University (1978). Dr. Dickinson taught in the public schools of Camden, Jersey for several years. In 1978 she joined the African American Studies faculty at Trenton State College, now the College of Jersey, where she served as an Associate Professor and chair of the department. Dr. Dickinson's academic expertise included Africana literature and religion, black popular culture, women writers of the African Diaspora, and Media and Africana Studies. She lectured and wrote on the novels of African American science fiction novelist Octavia Butler, Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta, British anthologist and publisher Margaret Busby, and American novelist John A. Williams. Her analyses of the popular culture and cuisines of Diaspora peoples; the literature, history, and contemporary activities of women of African descent; and the Africana presence on the Information Superhighway have been both informed and enriched through extensive travel in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, and North and South America. In 1995 Dr. Dickinson was among the representatives from every continent at the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, where she spoke about the struggle of women on the African continent to address issues of equal rights for women, domestic and political violence, and female circumcision. The American Embassy in Muscat, Oman (2003) and the American Consulate in Strasbourg, France (2001) hosted Dickinson as Black History Month speaker. She conducted programs for students, military personnel, academics, and Foreign Service officers. As a member of the American Social History Project's New Media Classroom National Faculty, and the Georgetown University Visible Knowledge Project research consortia, Dr. Dickinson's pedagogical work included a research project on the impact of technology and visual images on student learning. She also served as the lead consultant to the Media Classroom/NEH HBCU Learning to Look initiative with Spelman College and Dillard University; hosted the 2001 Digitizing Divas faculty development institute for humanities professionals; developed Media materials for Africana Studies by infusing the latest technologies into Africana Studies curriculum design; and trained educators on methods and materials for introducing technology and Africana Studies into public school and/or university curricula. Her Teaching Africana Studies and Humanities with Technology consultancies have included presentations at the National Humanities Center, University of Maryland College Park, Clark-Atlanta University, Temple University, Howard University, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Millersville University, Bates College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Ecole Normale Superieur in Dakar, Senegal. Dr. Dickinson co-authored the 1990 and 1991 editions of Tougaloo College's Mission Involvement Program textbook; contributed biographical sketches of police officer Margaret Creswell Hiawatha, AME Zion pastor Rev. …

Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson

In 1998, Nalo Hopkinson joined the ranks of Black science fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, and Steven Barnes, among others. The Jamaican-born Hopkinson is the daughter of the late Slade Hopkinson, the Guyanese actor, poet, and playwright who was part of Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop. Hopkinson spent her first sixteen years living in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana. For the past twenty-three years she has resided in Toronto, Canada. She infuses the tropes of science fiction and fantasy with Caribbean folklore and culture. In 1997 she won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest for Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Books, 1998) and is a recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Foundation award for emerging writers; the Locus Award, First Novel Category; and the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Hopkinson's first novel also made the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Award. Brown Girl is a post-Holocaust novel set in the twenty-first century inner city of Toronto, which has suffer ed an economic collapse. The novel chronicles the struggles of one woman, Ti-Jeanne, to reconcile her individuality as a young North American woman and unwed mother with the group orientation of her Afro-Caribbean ancestry, which includes a nascent ability as a mystic. Hopkinson's second novel, Midnight Robber, will appear from Warner Books in March, 2000. Set on a Caribbean-colonized planet and told in a hybrid creole, it is a science fictional allegory for displacement and exile. She counts African American science fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler among the writers whose work has inspired her. (Delany was one of the writers-in-residence when Hopkinson attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop at Michigan State University in 1995.) Hopkinson is currently editing The Dub Side, an anthology of Caribbean fabulist fiction. This interview is based on Hopkinson's answers to a series of interrogatories which I presented to her in February, 1999, about Brown Girl and about her perspective as the newest (then) Black science fiction writer and the newest (still) Black female science fiction writer. Rutledge: Why are you a writer of Black fantasy? Hopkinson: Because it's better than being a writer of purple prose? I'm a writer. I'm predominantly black. I write fantasy (actually, I say speculative because my work can include elements of science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, horror, and magic realism). I'm not a writer of black fantasy. (I go into that more below.) Rutledge: How long have you been interested in Black fantasy? What do you know of your predecessors like Butler, Delany, Saunders, Barnes, and others? Hopkinson: I think perhaps we're using the word fantasy in different ways, so I need some clarification. Are you using it as an umbrella term for all the genres of fantastical writing? I'm accustomed to hearing it used to name one specific genre. According to the classifications with which I'm familiar, Butler writes science fiction, not fantasy. Delany has written both. Saunders' Imaro trilogy was sword and sorcery (i.e., a sub-genre of fantasy). Barnes writes futuristic action adventure as well as having co-written hard sf with people such as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Tananarive Due has been dubbed a horror author. I don't know Virginia Hamilton's work very well, but she has published young adult science fiction as well as collections of African American folktales. I've read some form of fantastical literature since I was a tot, be it folktales or Homer's Iliad, so I gravitated naturally toward the sf shelves. Some time in my 20s I saw a photograph of Chip Delany, with whose work I'd fallen in love on first encountering it, and realized that he was black. I'd never heard of such a thing before. I wept. It felt as though my universe had just doubled in size. Though my life was surrounded with Caribbean writers of color (my father and his friends), none of them wrote sf. …

Commentary: American Literary History as Spatial Practice

In his recent review of Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women and Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, African-American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany raises concerns that are very much at the heart of ongoing critical debates about American literary canons and their respective histories. To the extent that those debates are territorial disputes or border wars intent on remapping academic terrain in ways that cede more territory to writers marginalized by gender, sexual preference, race, or all of those at the same time, Delany's comments on Haraway's inquiries into the politics of scientific representation and her attempts at remapping the nature/culture borderlands merit the attention of those of us (whoever we may be) interested in reconfiguring the shape and dimensions of American literary history. Writes Delany: