Naming What Is:Black Feminist Speculative Pedagogies Carmel Ohman (bio) INTRODUCTION: NONREALIST VEHICLES FOR THE REAL In a world where the government breeds dragons to eat people of color, Black women freedom fighters called "Sapphires" cultivate the ultimate survival strategy: they train the dragons. Sapphires strategically satisfy the dragons' hunger for "dark meat" by feeding them soul food.1 Once the unnamed narrator is able to "si[t] astride" the "huge" "beautiful" leader of the dragons named "Queen," the Black women's revolution can begin.2 N. K. Jemisin's short story "Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death" (2019) uses [End Page 298] nonrealist devices to diagnose long-standing structural violences while gesturing toward alternative worlds. In this way, the story enacts Octavia Butler's statement on the imaginative work of speculative fiction: "There's nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns."3 There is "nothing new" about the U.S. state systematically stereotyping and killing Black people. Dragons might as well take their place among linked anti-Black, misogynist, and heterosexist tools of state violence. Just as the story's narrator trains and "si[ts] astride" the very creature designed to kill her, Jemisin also reharnesses discursive violences that mark Black women in particular as angry and expendable.4 Dragons emerge as a nonrealist vehicle asserting the necessity and immanence of "new suns."5 Ending on the cusp of a Black women's revolution, Jemisin's story points to possible worlds that are free of police murders, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and the relentless scapegoating of Black womanhood. Here I make a brief case for teaching U.S. women's studies with an emphasis on Black feminist speculative fiction—a genre of writing by Black women, cis and trans, that uses nonrealist world-building to do the political work of valuing Black genders and sexualities.6 Nonrealist narrative choices in this context do not signify the unreal but rather illuminate multiple layers of Black life in a real world structured by white supremacy. My texts of focus are Black feminist because they interrogate dominant assumptions at the intersections of race, sex, sexuality, and gender in the interests of Black women's freedom.7 The pedagogical reflections I offer stem from my experience teaching women's studies during the coronavirus pandemic and abolitionist uprisings since spring 2020.8 Like Farah Jasmine Griffin, I have been struck by how Black speculative texts can model "community-building" for students "in the midst of economic, social, political, and ecological catastrophe."9 Griffin ultimately emphasizes how the genre can help students imagine different worlds—"new suns," in Butler's formulation. Yet the white supremacist storming of the Capitol together with the murders of Breonna Taylor, Riah Milton, George Floyd, and too many others have since compelled me to sit longer with the first part of Butler's formulation: "There's nothing new / under the sun." As Saidiya Hartman writes, Black Americans have long "been allowed to die in great numbers without a crisis ever being declared."10 Pandemics past and present only accelerate and expose the realities of institutionalized vulnerability to death. Jemisin's story redescribes and reclaims the violences of "nothing new." Refusing the passive erasures of being "allowed to die," the story recasts power in "huge," "beautiful," and "shimmering" terms.11 It makes interpretive demands that render existing forms of state-sanctioned violence newly legible, offering pedagogical tools for naming what is. Naming what is is an underacknowledged [End Page 299] strength of Black feminist speculative fiction more broadly. Black feminist speculative pedagogies can foster a deeper understanding of the real by way of nonrealist narrative. READING DIFFERENTLY: THE PEDAGOGICAL IMPERATIVES OF BLACK FEMINIST SPECULATIVE TEXTS Black feminist speculative texts demand different reading practices because their nonrealist devices defamiliarize real-world uses of power to oppress and alienate.12 In Bodyminds Reimagined (2018), Sami Schalk cites Marie Jakober on the critical capacities of speculative fiction: "'it makes us think differently. It makes us examine things we have never examined. Even better, it makes us re-imagine things we thought we knew.'"13 Here again is the multilayered promise of thinking differently that informs Butler's pronouncement. In Jemisin...
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