This chapter focuses on the fiction of women’s liberation and its representations of vegetarianism. The first part offers readings of the fiction of Brigid Brophy, a pioneer of the animal rights movement, and Isabel Colegate in the context of the British class system; the second uses several novels by North American writers (Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Alison Lurie) to offer a rethinking of Carol J. Adams’s theory of feminist-vegetarianism before suggesting the ways in which Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn helps us to link vegetarian/vegan theory with decolonial theory and practice.

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.

Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.

This chapter examines science fiction written during the heyday of the modern synthesis, from the early 1940s to the end of the Cold War, identifying two major phases in science fiction’s representation of the posthuman – one relying on eugenics, the other on genetic engineering. This history has an important bearing on science policy, for it exposes an unacknowledged kinship between science fiction and the policy scenarios developed by some prominent commentators on genetics. Both jeremiads against genetic enhancement and eager anticipations of a posthuman future rely on narrative conventions, world building, and rhetorical practices characteristic of literature, while masquerading as nonfiction. In literature, the formal conventions of fiction alert readers to the provisional nature of extrapolation and safeguard readers against taking possible futures as inevitable. Scientific jeremiads and anticipations, by contrast, warn against a future entailed by a fiction.

This chapter argues that climate justice must be understood in the context of reparations for enslavement and requires a speculative recentering of history. Climate ethics often employs the lenses of corrective justice, the payment of debt, and distributive justice, the equitable sharing of benefits and burdens of greenhouse gas production. Placing climate disruption in the history of diaspora and enslavement allows for a theorization of reparative justice. In making this argument, I dialogue with the work of Octavia Butler, whose novels Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents imagine climate futures without seeking to escape responsibilities to the past. Furthermore, Butler’s alternative history and speculative fiction place African American resistance, and especially African American women’s creation of freedom, at the center of history and the construction of more just and sustainable futures.

This essay links the environmental resistance embodied by Edward Abbey’s Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang after the Vietnam War and the speculatively fictional future of Octavia Butler’s Olamina’s ecofeminist resistance (The Parable of the Talents) to a war that seems all too imminent in the contemporary US, a place where climate change denial is political policy and the interests of fossil fuel magnates matter more than the lives of individual citizens. This essay explores how American ecocriticism interrogates and informs our conceptions of war, whom we are fighting, and the ways that war generates environmental exigency.

Despite both its rhetoric and its intentions, activism is often ableist. A contemporary project to crip feminism is fundamentally epistemological and requires re-evaluating the state of embodiment, forms of social justice, and choices towards which we understand ourselves to be moving. Disability scholars seem increasingly interested in studying not just what we read (a matter of representation) but how we read and how narrative is formulated (a matter of knowing). Many recent imaginative works by women take up illness and disability not as classic metaphors for limitation and disenfranchisementor even just to create realistic portrayalsbut as specifically and emphatically phenomenological modes of engaging the world. With readings of Chicana feminist fiction (Ana Castillo), graphic memoir (Alison Bechdel) and black speculative fiction (Octavia Butler), I argue that the body under duress becomes a source of rewriting the terms under which identities and social relationships are defined. In this sense they speak and write directly into a moment in which it is the capacity to think courageously, and expansively, about what things 1mean that we must rigorously safeguard.