This chapter explores enchantment and speculation as features of contemporary black literature, connecting earlier forms of Pan-Africanist gathering to twenty-first-century preoccupations with genre fiction and popular culture. As political critiques of racialized capitalism intensify to include queries about the fundamental assumptions of materialism, black authors in a variety of settings and genres have drawn on forms of the immaterial – religion, spirituality, magic, ghostly haunts – to ground and illuminate possibilities for black art and life. The chapter first contextualizes the historical background of contemporary black literature and then explores contemporary models of gathering or cohesion based on such radiant effects as the sound wave, the empathic transfer, and the spirit. Two novels by radically searching black writers, Erna Brodber and Octavia Butler, help ground the chapter, as both authors demonstrate the thematic and formal possibilities of nonmaterialist thinking in global black literature and culture. Brodber’s experimentation with ideas from a variety of Afro-descended religious traditions in tandem with Butler’s genre-inflected vision of apocalypse and survival present a vision of black collaboration across difference, timescape, and distance – and demonstrate a prevailing investment in the potential for black (re)gathering on the other side of, in the wake of, catastrophe.

Recent research by climate scientists suggest that New Orleans, much of which is below sea level and protected from the sea only by a rapidly eroding marshland, may someday become uninhabitable. The city’s literature of the last few decades has been preoccupied with the theme of fatalism and apocalypse, and the deadly epidemics of the nineteenth century have provided rich symbolic terrain for figuring the troubles that “plague” the city and that will someday mean its end. Some recent work by women of color – notably Erna Brodber and Brenda Marie Osbey – delineates a different literary project, one appropriate to a post-apocalyptic diaspora, namely the work of remembering. Both the traditional fatalism and this emerging interest in memory will likely be central themes to watch for in the major literature associated with the New Orleans in coming decades.