“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement Shelby Crosby (bio) and Terrence Tucker (bio) In the essay, “Positive Obsession,1” Octavia Butler explores how she became a writer and, more importantly, why she chose to write science fiction (or what we now call Afrofuturism). Terribly shy, Butler’s love of science fiction and fantasy began as a way to escape and build worlds where she could be “a magical horse, a Martian, a telepath…. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these” (128). To be anywhere but here is part of Afrofuturism’s appeal. While these worlds can explore the realities of being Black in our current world, it also creates new images and feelings about said world. And that’s what we hope this issue will do for y’all—we want these essays to expand your minds and maybe even change how you see the world as the 80th CLA Convention we organized in Memphis in 2021 did for us. That conference inspired us to develop this issue. We want to keep the conversations started there going. The convention’s theme, Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions, carved out space to discuss explicitly the extensive presence of Black futurity, of race and technology, and of fantasy and science fiction as key parts of African American literary tradition. Black writers have always infused their work with speculative elements even as they chronicle Black life with unmatched forms of realism. And while we see Afrofuturism present in art, music, and fashion, as Isiah Warner III and Lisa Yasezk claim in their introduction to Literary Afrofuturism, “such powerful artistic statements derive from a much older entertainment medium: the printed word” which can “extend back to the writing of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley and nineteenth century abolitionist, solider, and journalist Martin Delany and continue today with the award-winning SF of Delany, Jemisin, and a host of other authors” (3). Our ideas for the convention and this issue stand on the shoulders of the Memphis native Sheree Renee Thomas, whose 2000 edited collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora served as a launch point to study Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism as traditions that reach as far back as the production of African American literature itself, as well as the history of CLA, itself founded in Memphis and still committed to the study and teaching of Black literature and language. We felt it critical to explore the history this tradition [End Page 1] while simultaneously celebrating the contemporary explosion of Afrofuturism in the mainstream, embodied by 2018’s Black Panther, and the well-known, overdue credit that Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler have begun to garner. These mainstream, public discussions of what Reynaldo Anderson has termed “Afrofuturism 2.0” appear at a crucial time in the history of Black folks because even as the technological advances and social media platforms that fuel this moment have brought Black people around the world more access, opportunities, and autonomy to be seen and heard, the external forces of white supremacy, colonialism, and market fundamentalism continue to oppress and dehumanize communities. Some of those forces have been emboldened over the last fifteen years as the post-Civil Rights, post-Obama period has failed to reverse the institutional impact of white supremacist hegemony. The persistence of police brutality and the explosion of mass incarceration, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the upsurge of white nationalism into mainstream rhetoric and policy have led many to abandon hope of ever achieving the equity that many have sought for generations. For some, the result has been the descent into the violence and apathy that engulfed the Black community in the 1980s and 1990s. The second, perhaps more insidious has been the abandonment of collective action in favor of an individualism that prioritizes the self-consciousness or assimilation of the one but rejects the philosophies of collective uplift over which activists, intellectuals, and artists battled deep into the 20th century. Historically African Americans relied on faith traditions, specifically through Black liberation theology and the black prophetic tradition...