Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement PDF
Preview Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement
AFROFUTURISM RISING N E W S U N S RACE, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY IN THE SPECULATIVE Susana M. Morris and Kinitra D. Brooks, Series Editors AFROFUTURISM RISING The Literary Prehistory of a Movement Isiah Lavender III THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2019 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at catalog.loc.gov. Cover design by Stacey Robinson & John Jennings Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Palatino ALWAYS HEATHER ALWAYS C O N T E N T S Acknowledgments ix Introduction On Defining Afrofuturism 1 PART I 1619–1903: THE AFROFUTURIST VISTA AND THE POSSIBILITY OF FREEDOM Chapter 1 Hope and Freedom Technologies 25 Chapter 2 Black Uprisings and the Fight for the Future 48 Chapter 3 Of Alien Abductions, Pocket Universes, Trickster Technologies, and Slave Narratives 77 PART II AFROFUTURISM AND CLASSIC TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVELS Chapter 4 Black Bodies in Space: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God 107 Chapter 5 “Metallically Black”: Bigger Thomas and the Black Apocalyptic Vision of Richard Wright’s Native Son 127 Chapter 6 Racial Warfare, Radical Afrofuturism, and John A. Williams’s Captain Blackman 153 Conclusion Into the Black-o-Sphere 186 Works Cited 197 Index 217 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ABOVE ALL ELSE, I thank God for inspiring me to embrace writing and thinking about stuff in general and science fiction specifically and placing people in my path to activate my ambition from teachers to colleagues, fam- ily to friends, and my Miniature Schnauzer Rocco, as well as the owl who stopped by on occasion in the deep night to keep me company, as crazy as that sounds. I never dreamed of doing a second monograph, yet here I am seven years later. Thank you, God! This monograph consciously began at the 2012 NEH Summer Institute on Contemporary African American Literature held at Penn State University, where I would share ideas ultimately resulting in the fourth chapter of this book. The book chapter has been slightly modified from its originally pub- lished version, “An Afrofuturist Reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which first appeared in LIT: Literature-Interpretation-The- ory, vol. 27, no. 3, 2016, pp. 213–33. Therefore, I simply must thank Lovalerie King, Maryemma Graham, Trudier Harris, Dana Williams, Thabiti Lewis, Lanisa Kitchiner, Ayesha Hardison, Susan Weeber, Shelli Homer, Brandon Manning, Kameelah Martin, Shaila Mehra, Earl Brooks, Quentin Miller, Nicole Sparling, Beauty Bragg, Therí Pickens, Aisha Damali, David Green, Nancy Kang, and Alicia Inshiradu. But I’d like to especially thank Cherise Pollard, Marlene Allen, and Claudia Dreiling for reading early versions of ix
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