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Chapter 15 - From Nothing to Something

Black Speculative Fiction and the Trayvon Generation

from Part III - Readings in Genre, Gender, and Genealogies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2023

Angela Naimou
Affiliation:
Clemson University, South Carolina
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Summary

This chapter argues that there is a special relationship between Blackness and speculative fiction (SF). Taking Afrofuturism as a point of departure, it shows that Black SF offers unique and important ways of theorizing key concepts in contemporary Black studies, including pleasure, power, and death. After examining these qualities, it engages in a close reading of the Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah short story “The Finkelstein Five” to show the relevance of Black SF to scholars and authors writing in what poet Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Trayvon Generation.” While Alexander uses the term to describe children coming of age under the post-millennial regime of anti-Black policing and BLM protest, this chapter uses it to explain that authors and scholars entering the profession in the same period have turned to the speculative to critically interrogate the violent rupture of police murder against oxymoronic promises of racial advancement. The speculative thus offers important framing for both the lived experiences of racial violence and fantasies of making a just and livable world.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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