In the settler-enslaving context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where multiple discourse communities (politics, science, Christianity, and abolitionism) worked in tandem to signify Blackness as a distinct biological entity, Black writers crafted an alternative symbolic order that understood racialized Blackness as a socially constructed embodied experience. This chapter argues that, for thinkers like Phillis Wheatley Peters, Adam Carman, Maria Stewart, Rev. J. W. Loguen, and Harriet Jacobs, the Black body is a site of overdetermined experiences that – when studied – reveal the machinations of anti-Black sociopolitical processes. By focalizing three areas of critical interrogation – moral inversion, natural rights, and sentimentality – I show how these thinkers interrogated the West’s foundational mythologies of nation and selfhood.

Set in the midst of the quotidian anti-Black terrorism that circumscribed Black life in Jim Crow America, the HBO series Lovecraft Country seamlessly combines Black history and graphic horror to tell a story through a distinctly Black creative and reflective lens. A reading of the journey of Hippolyta Freeman in episode 7, “I Am,” reveals how the means of embodiment, speculative fiction, and elements of Black feminist Afrofuturism are used as a fulcrum to shift the critical weight away from the grim reality of oppression and towards the possibility of escape and liberation. The episode offers a revolutionary representation of the Black body as a conduit for self-discovery, a tool for circumventing anti-Blackness, and ultimately a vehicle for affirming a broader spectrum of Black aliveness that reverberates far beyond the realm of speculative fiction.

This chapter looks at how the notions of black escape and black wishland have been conceptualized in African American utopianism since the post-WWII conception of the Beloved Community, a conception mostly associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. Through its discussions of Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” (1971), Parliament’s “Chocolate City” (1975), Reginald Hudlin’s “Space Traders” (1994), Octavia E. Butler’s “The Book of Martha” (2003), and Chesya Burke’s “The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason” (2011), this chapter argues that these texts, if read collectively, not only reveal that the debates between black utopians and antiutopians parallel those between the opponents and proponents of Afropessimism, but they also suggest that liberating black life from social death requires combining the best of Afropessimism and black antiutopian critique with the best of black aliveness, Afro-fabulation, and the black utopian imagination.