Isiah Lavender III

The Literary Prehistory of a Movement

Afrofuturism Rising

An analysis of US science fiction, through the lens of critical race theory, that illuminates how the genre offers new directions for serious appraisals of race and racism between yesterday, today, and tomorrow In Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction, Isiah Lavender III takes seriously the theoretical, stylistic, and rhetorical possibilities inherent in the genre of science fiction toward challenging perceptions of race, ethnicity, whiteness, and Blackness in US culture. To do so, he examines works by a wide variety of science fiction writers exploring racial themes--Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Edgar Allan Poe, Mat Johnson (whose Pym [2011] is a direct challenge to Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket [1838]), Derrick Bell, and others. Locating racial contexts, social categorizations, and cultural patterns in US speculative fiction, Lavender employs the tenets of critical race theory to sight the unanticipated things the genre might have to say about race at the intersection between imaginary laws and how we, as readers, partake in this imagining. Recognizable science fiction tropes--such as alien contact, time travel, contagion, generation starships, the near future, alternate history, climate change, among others--constitute science fictional novum. The novum is the new thing, invention, or novelty introduced into the fictional world that deliberately functions as the catalyst for the change made in the fictional world, differing from the reader's world. Lavender coined the term noirum to represent the legislative innovations prompted within the fictional world to cope with, if not to control, the impact of the novum. Whether it is a make-believe amendment, imaginary federal court ruling, fictitious executive order, or something else entirely, the noirum identifies the ways in which these powerful science fiction motifs are organized around question of race. Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction analyzes the ways in which science fiction has engaged with institutions and the law, offering narratives or concepts, or both, that uphold the racial status quo or fictional alternatives to existing legal structures. Bringing critical race theory and science fiction together, Lavender highlights stories that not only counter the dominant narrative of white supremacy but also envision a future in which people are united in full colored racial consciousness against dehumanization of any kind.

Future Pasts

Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction

Grace L. Dillon

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

Taryne Jade Taylor

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms delivers a new, inclusive examination of science fiction, from close analyses of single texts to large-scale movements, providing readers with decolonized models of the future, including print, media, race, gender, and social justice. This comprehensive overview of the field explores representations of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and ethnic histories that disrupt the “imperial gaze”. In four parts, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms considers the look of futures from the margins, foregrounding the issues of Indigenous groups, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, and any people whose stakes in the global order of envisioning futures are generally constrained due to the mechanics of our contemporary world. The book extends current discussions in the area, looking at cutting-edge developments in the discipline of science fiction and diverse futurisms as a whole. Offering a dynamic mix of approaches and expansive perspectives, this volume will appeal to academics and researchers seeking to orient their own interventions into broader contexts.

The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms

Reexamines canonical African American literary texts as science fiction, applying the narrative practice of afrofuturism in order to better understand the black experience in America.

Black and Brown Planets embarks on a timely exploration of the American obsession with color in its look at the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film), lifting blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. This collection considers the role of race and ethnicity in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. In the next section, analysis of indigenous science fiction addresses the effects of colonization, helps discard the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, this section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being in and moving between two cultures. By infusing more color in this otherwise monochrome genre, Black and Brown Planets imagines alternate racial galaxies with viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny.

Isiah Lavender III

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