Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women’s Fiction: New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative
Autor Cassandra L. Jonesen Limba Engleză Paperback – noi 2024
How do Black women writing speculative fiction explore the use of memory as a potential strategy for liberation? In Black Speculative Feminisms, Cassandra L. Jones looks at the writings of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Rasheedah Phillips, and Nnedi Okorafor to chart those moments where characters harness, or fail to harness, the power of memory. These instances transform memory—individual and collective, bodily and archival—from passive recollection into direct or indirect social action. Taking a Black feminist approach, Jones addresses several emancipatory themes within Afrofuturism: the decolonization of time that can be found in fiction employing non-Western and non-linear expressions of time, exploring futurity and the projection of a full range of expressions of Black humanity into anticipated futures, and imagining new worlds and novel approaches to old problems. Drawing on critical fabulation and restorative justice, she forwards restorative fabulation as the mechanism by which speculative fiction offers a healing site for authors and readers to process generational trauma while imagining more equitable futures.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259290
ISBN-10: 0814259294
Pagini: 120
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.17 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative
ISBN-10: 0814259294
Pagini: 120
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 10 mm
Greutate: 0.17 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative
Recenzii
“Black Speculative Feminisms reminds us once again that Black feminists are at the vanguard of every genre they deign to take on. Jones provides a wonderfully rich accounting of Black speculative feminist writers across time and space, encouraging readers to see the radical potential of reimagining our pasts, presents, and futures, with speculative fiction as the means to get us there.” —Moya Bailey, Digital Alchemist of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network
“Jones’s theory of restorative fabulation, her contributions to Black ecofeminism, and her fluency in Black feminist literary theory provide an illuminating lens for understanding how Black women archive the past and create the future.” —Shelley S. Streeby, author of Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism
“Black Speculative Feminisms convincingly demonstrates that the body of work by Octavia Butler and her successors represents a coherent and sophisticated artistic and social undertaking, one that is best understood on its own terms rather than made to fit existing critical criteria.” —Brian Attebery, author of Decoding Gender in Science Fiction
Notă biografică
Cassandra L. Jones is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, speculative fiction, technology, and memory.
Extras
These recent Black feminist calls for annotation and citation are reiterations of an ongoing mobilization toward both remembering and recognizing the contributions of Black women and all Black people. This book collects the interventions of Black women writers of speculative fiction into the patriarchal, capitalist, and racist urge to forget under the umbrella of what I am calling “Black speculative feminisms.” Authors such as Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Rasheedah Phillips serve not simply as examples of theoretical frameworks in action but themselves offer radical frameworks by which we are invited to annotate our past, present, and future.
Butler’s record-keeping carries on the tradition of annotation in the form of lineage records noted in the family bible, diaries, and cookbooks created from the notecards of home cooks, each with their own histories within Black American women’s cultures. Just as historians of Black women’s history have excavated these sources to understand the worlds of Black women, expanding the work of historians beyond public and official records, so too have Afrofuturist scholars examined Black writing as speculative, expanding our notion of Black literature to include science fiction and fantasy.
Linking both these worlds, Octavia E. Butler provides an example of the wake work or memory-work carried on via Black women’s tradition of knowledge production from the margins in her lifetime’s worth of meticulous record-keeping and the bequeathing of her papers to the Huntington Library archives. This annotation is an act of both radical reproduction and a map of Butler’s own knowledge production. Butler notes with an attention to record-keeping and calling attention to existing archives of Black-produced knowledge gestures toward a long Black history taking us from nommo (the power of the word) in African American oral tradition all the way through to contemporary hashtags.
I briefly sketch these examples to turn attention toward the memory-work found in the novels and short stories of Black women. The novel is a didactic device with the power to connect us to meaning, teach our shared Black mythology, create communities, and instill an Afrocentric worldview with the potential to address the ongoing trauma of living in an anti-Black world. These literary “homespaces” operate as a safe place to be ourselves, as a position from which to theorize, as Kinitra D. Brooks argues: “In this space of self-revelation, black women creators are freed from the constraints of literary respectability politics in which they must always be concerned with larger goals of black feminist goals of being deemed writers of literature.” Black women’s writing is a “fluid fiction” that operates between genres such as horror, science fiction, fantasy, and historical realism and emerges as a speculative act that rejects the genre definitions that are used to dismiss our contributions. Toni Morrison equally notes the relegation of women’s writing to genre writing such as “magical realism” as a means of dismissal: “For literary historians and literary critics [magical realism] just seemed to be a convenient way to skip again what was the truth in the art of certain writers.” While Morrison argues that the Black women’s writing offers us insight into the issues facing us and that they need not serve as a “recipe” for solving those problems Black women’s speculative fiction, as visionary fiction, does offer, if not solutions outright, at least paradigm shifts that can offer new questions. These questions and potential solutions offer “new ways of making-sensible,” and the fluidity of Black women’s speculative fiction explores that uneasy amalgamation of “real” and fantastic, object and metaphor, and offers an unusual means of annotating those material histories where Black emotional and intellectual interiority are redacted.
Butler’s record-keeping carries on the tradition of annotation in the form of lineage records noted in the family bible, diaries, and cookbooks created from the notecards of home cooks, each with their own histories within Black American women’s cultures. Just as historians of Black women’s history have excavated these sources to understand the worlds of Black women, expanding the work of historians beyond public and official records, so too have Afrofuturist scholars examined Black writing as speculative, expanding our notion of Black literature to include science fiction and fantasy.
Linking both these worlds, Octavia E. Butler provides an example of the wake work or memory-work carried on via Black women’s tradition of knowledge production from the margins in her lifetime’s worth of meticulous record-keeping and the bequeathing of her papers to the Huntington Library archives. This annotation is an act of both radical reproduction and a map of Butler’s own knowledge production. Butler notes with an attention to record-keeping and calling attention to existing archives of Black-produced knowledge gestures toward a long Black history taking us from nommo (the power of the word) in African American oral tradition all the way through to contemporary hashtags.
I briefly sketch these examples to turn attention toward the memory-work found in the novels and short stories of Black women. The novel is a didactic device with the power to connect us to meaning, teach our shared Black mythology, create communities, and instill an Afrocentric worldview with the potential to address the ongoing trauma of living in an anti-Black world. These literary “homespaces” operate as a safe place to be ourselves, as a position from which to theorize, as Kinitra D. Brooks argues: “In this space of self-revelation, black women creators are freed from the constraints of literary respectability politics in which they must always be concerned with larger goals of black feminist goals of being deemed writers of literature.” Black women’s writing is a “fluid fiction” that operates between genres such as horror, science fiction, fantasy, and historical realism and emerges as a speculative act that rejects the genre definitions that are used to dismiss our contributions. Toni Morrison equally notes the relegation of women’s writing to genre writing such as “magical realism” as a means of dismissal: “For literary historians and literary critics [magical realism] just seemed to be a convenient way to skip again what was the truth in the art of certain writers.” While Morrison argues that the Black women’s writing offers us insight into the issues facing us and that they need not serve as a “recipe” for solving those problems Black women’s speculative fiction, as visionary fiction, does offer, if not solutions outright, at least paradigm shifts that can offer new questions. These questions and potential solutions offer “new ways of making-sensible,” and the fluidity of Black women’s speculative fiction explores that uneasy amalgamation of “real” and fantastic, object and metaphor, and offers an unusual means of annotating those material histories where Black emotional and intellectual interiority are redacted.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments Introduction Black Speculative Feminisms and Restorative Fabulation Chapter 1 Memory as Horror and Healing in Tananarive Due’s The Good House and Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms Chapter 2 Memory, Decolonization, and Alien Invasion in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon Chapter 3 Memory and Time Travel in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Rasheedah Phillips’s Telescoping Effect: Part One Chapter 4 Memory and the Reproduction of Regime: Anyanwu as Lieu de Memoire in Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist Series Conclusion Next Steps as We Realize the World Is on Fire Bibliography Index
Descriere
Charts the moments in Black women’s science fiction and fantasy where characters harness, or fail to harness, the power of memory, transforming it from passive recollection to social action.