Early African American humour functioned as a method of cultural formation, an in-group way of communicating based on the needs and experiences of the enslaved community. Contemporary Black stand-up has been a foundation upon which to reveal realities of Black life and make those realities accessible and entertaining to an increasingly global audience. This chapter explores the innovative styles and approaches to the artform as an indication that the limits of Black stand-up are expanding. Using three case studies, it demonstrates the Afrofuturistic trajectory of the genre. Elements of resistance have given way to comedic approaches that centre imagination; fleeting moments of revenge are superseded by the materiality of the emancipated Black body; a sense of contentment and personal growth are foregrounded, ephemeral pleasures looming still; and rituals of play produce Afrofuturistic otherworlds where difference matters, disabused of its regulatory power to rank and marginalise.

The chapter delves into the intricacies of representations of outer space, exposing their entanglement with colonialist narratives. It analyzes the ideology behind space exploration to show that, rather than being something “new” or aligned with futurism, these texts repeat colonialist conquest narratives while proposing alternative methodologies of “worlding” beyond conventional materialist paradigms. By critiquing mainstream notions of space travel, this chapter illuminates the Cartesian–Baconian separation of humans from nature, which, the author argues, perpetuates antiblackness. Through an analysis of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, the chapter illuminates how alternative narratives use outer space as a metaphor to oppose notions of the separation of humans from the natural world and anti-blackness. Sun Ra’s film not only challenges traditional modes of travel but also hints at alternative ways of understanding exploration, most especially of oneself. This shift in perspective signifies a departure from the conventional idea of discovering new worlds towards a more profound concept of co-creating realities, emphasizing shifts in consciousness over mere geographical exploration. Drawing upon the work of Katherine McKittrick and others, this chapter also invites a reconsideration of the ways in which geography itself is constructed, rather than an objective material fact of the phenomenological world.

The relationship of oppositional gender consciousness to narrative is the particular focus of this chapter’s attention to “gendered worlds” in postwar utopian and speculative writing. Tracing the resistance to the “defeating circularity” of gender binarism since the 1950s, this chapter surveys authors’ (re)figurations of sex and gender, as well as race, from the sex/gender fluidity in Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel Delany, to the queer kinships of contemporary queer and Afrofuturist writers. The chapter considers a cluster of feminist dystopian novels modeled after Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; forgetting Atwood’s narratological escape hatch in the “Historical Notes,” these novels are unable to imagine past the violent motive of binaristic gender ideology. Novels by Louise Erdrich and Lidia Yuknavich succeed in breaking that mold, offering queer futures that reimagine reproductive futurism in a new utopian register. The chapter concludes with the queer futures of brilliant African-American writers, including Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor.

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.

This chapter discusses Afrofuturism with reference to a wide range of literary works, influential critical and theoretical accounts, and artistic manifestos, identifying its overlaps and distinctions from the broader speculative turn apparent in African American literature from the 1980s onward. The chapter focuses on two rubrics that lend cohesion to the array of genres, styles, and aesthetic principles associated with the label of Afrofuturism: the politics of time and the idea of race as technology. Through various devices of temporal dislocation, Afrofuturist works invent revisionist histories, shatter consensus narratives about the present, and challenge prevailing discourses of futurity. In addition, the chapter argues that Afrofuturist literature at its best defamiliarizes established ways of reading race through its innovative engagement with race-making techniques and technologies ranging from genre conventions to genetic engineering.

Examining Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), this chapter argues that Butler uses an Afrofuturist aesthetic to create an imagined future that is not simply a description of American life, but a possible direction for rethinking who we are and how we live. It explores the prescient politics of Butler’s science fiction by showing how the political and economic systems in which the characters move both deeply impact how they live and are also strikingly absent. At its most basic political level, the Parable series offers a dystopian warning about possible futures and about the present. Responding to the neoliberal undermining of the values of public services under Reagan and beyond, the novels warn about both power-seekers filling political vacuums and our own willingness to ignore the consequences. The chapter ends with an examination of the benefits and drawbacks of Earthseed, the protagonist’s fictional religion, that prompts readers to reconsider the value of community itself, one dedicated to new ways of living that will challenge people to grow in new ways.

Often focused on the rapid development of technologies (both scientific and social) and their dangers, American science fiction (SF) novels have highlighted how the twentieth century is characterized by truly global crises and possibilities, from the mass migrations and their various exploitations in the early twentieth century, to the Cold War and the direct threat of global nuclear destruction, to giving voice to those denied rights and silenced both in the earlier SF canon and in the larger body politic, and to the climate emergency. Distancing these political issues from the real, twentieth-century SF novels may risk making specific political moments seem fantastic, but they can simultaneously enable new forms of global and communal visions that are (increasingly) necessary to political action. To discuss these visions, the chapter discusses a range of different traditions running through SF and parallel forms of work throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of Black and Afrofuturist writers in the period.

This chapter argues that it is difficult to think about Afrofuturism without considering diaspora. At the same time, it shows how speculative writing reimagines diasporic paradigms derived from historical trauma. It begins with the search for an alternative epistemology in early twentieth-century African American speculative writing, where a turn to an African utopia promises relief from anti-Black historical violence, figured as the healing of a scattered Black family reunited after a long estrangement. Such diasporic fantasies are frequently challenged by African thinkers, who refuse to let their homelands become fodder for imaginative projection alone and underscore fractures in transnational encounters. Tracing the flourishing of Afrofuturist paradigms since the 1990s, devoted to visions of a future where race neither magically disappears nor becomes all-encompassing, this chapter identifies currents of alienation and prophecy, dismemberment and remixing in a range of Afrofuturist projects, ending with the recent boom in African-centered perspectives.

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.

Via petitions for freedom, addresses to children, and writings about religious deliverance, Black authors of the first decade of the nation’s founding expressed hope and encouragement for a free future beyond themselves. Both early Black literary and emancipation efforts contributed to a project of imagining and producing early Black futures. Forms of intergenerational address reached beyond any individual author’s scope to speculate about the future and to address the actual Black children whom they acknowledged as part of their communities, among their potential readers, and as would-be beneficiaries of their work. When we consider print technologies among the larger scope of Black technoculture and theological discourse alongside other notions of the speculative, we can understand early Black community, literature, and generational address as a form of (proto-)Afrofuturism. The fullest understanding of Black literary sociality is generational in scale, extending Black print from producing Black community to imagining Black futurity. Attention to early African American literature’s future gesturing also allows us to regard later scholarly interest in literary “firsts” with an eye not only to our contemporary construction and reconstruction of literary canons but also to account for early Black writers’ most hopeful literary visions.

The second section foregrounds methodological approaches to twenty-first century fiction, starting with Candice Jenkins’s examination of Afro-Futurism and Afro-Pessimism as conceptual frameworks within which contemporary African American fiction has represented the past and present during “the Black Lives Matter era.” Discerning an inherently speculative quality to the two separate bodies of thought, Jenkins argues they share a “a certain radicalism–one inclined towards both building and destroying worlds.” This speculative radicality infuses the work of a remarkably broad range of writers, including N. K. Jemisin, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, with the generatively imagined restructured societies derived not from utopianism, but the negative affects of intractable historical racism.

Climate fiction (or cli-fi) is a still-emerging but broad and diverse category of fiction that addresses the challenges of climate change and its impacts on human and nonhuman life, in the present and in the future, on Earth and in more fantastical settings. This chapter offers an inclusive definition of this increasingly urgent genre, aiming to capture what's currently being published and to suggest other possibilities available to future cli-fi writers. Additionally, it sets out to expand the history of the genre, drawing on the work of Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra before offering a taxonomy of cli-fi's various contemporary forms, with examples from literary fiction, hard and soft sci-fi, eco-fabulism, afrofuturism, solarpunk, indigenous futurism, uncivilized writing, and other related subgenres

Contending with Kei Miller’s declaration in ‘A Smaller Sound, A Lesser Fury: A Eulogy for Dub Poetry’ that the genre has died, this essay uses the lens of transition to demonstrate the continued vitality of this Jamaican-rooted performance and neoliterary genre that serves political and aesthetic needs of the variously disempowered. The essay suggests Miller misconceives what dubpoetry is, threatening its vital social work and doing a disservice to the older generation of dubpoets and their inheritors. Providing evidence that the majority of first-generation dubpoets continue to create new work, collaborate, develop new subgenres, and teach, the essay offers close readings of work by dubpoetry’s heirs. Jamaican dubpoetry band The No-Maddz, Jamaican-British spoken word poet Raymond Antrobus and Canadian dub inheritors Klyde Broox, d’bi.young anitafrika and Kaie Kellough are shown to effect presentational, generic, thematic/political and media transitions in and from dubpoetry.

The epilogue looks in several directions at the crossroads of nuclear power to consider the future of Atomic Junction and the place of afrofuturism around nuclear power. It begins with conversations with students at the School of Nuclear and Allied Sciences who have difficulty getting jobs after their degrees. In one direction, nuclear power is on a path to success with plans to import large power reactors in coming years. In another direction, nuclear power is on a rocky road given challenges managing land disputes, equipment costs, earthquake faults and even basic regulation of petrol stations. While there are now many atomic physicists in Ghana, the dream for scientific equity has not been fully realized as the plight of families in Haatso and Kwabenya revealed.