Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement

244 Pages·2019·2.192 MB·English

by  Isiah Lavender III

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