Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement

Description

Growing out of the music scene, afrofuturism has emerged as an important aesthetic through films such as Black Panther and Get Out. While the significance of these sonic and visual avenues for afrofuturism cannot be underestimated, literature remains fundamental to understanding its full dimensions. Isiah Lavender’s Afrofuturism Rising explores afrofuturism as a narrative practice that enables users to articulate the interconnection between science, technology, and race across centuries.   By engaging with authors as diverse as Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Samuel R. Delany Jr., Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, Afrofuturism Rising extends existing scholarly conversations about who creates and what is created via science fiction. Through a trans-historical rereading of texts by these authors as science fiction, Lavender highlights the ways black experience in America has always been an experience of spatial and temporal dislocation akin to science fiction. Compelling and ambitious in scope, Afrofuturism Rising redefines both science fiction and literature as a whole. Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: On Defining Afrofuturism PART I 1619–1903: THE AFROFUTURIST VISTA AND THE POSSIBILITY OF FREEDOM 1 Hope and Freedom Technologies 2 Black Uprisings and the Fight for the Future 3 Of Alien Abductions, Pocket Universes, Trickster Technologies, and Slave Narratives PART II: AFROFUTURISM AND CLASSIC TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVELS 4 Black Bodies in Space: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God 5 “Metallically Black”: Bigger Thomas and the Black Apocalyptic Vision of Richard Wright’s Native Son 6 Racial Warfare, Radical Afrofuturism, and John A.Williams’s Captain Blackman Conclusion: Into the Black-o-Sphere Works Cited Index