The Black Imagination, Science Fiction and the Speculative

This text critically examines works in literature and film of the African and Black Diaspora as well as mainstream media and popular culture in which African descendant people are subjects, actors and agents in science fiction narratives about imagined futures—whether they be set on earth, or elsewhere in the universe: set in the future—near and distant, or alternative pasts. This book was published as a special issue of African Identities: An International Journal.

This book expands the discourse as well as the nature of critical commentary on science fiction, speculative fiction and futurism – literary and cinematic by Black writers. The range of topics include the following: black superheroes; issues and themes in selected works by Octavia Butler; selected work of Nalo Hopkinson; the utopian and dystopian impulse in the work of W.E. B. Du Bois and George Schuyler; Derrick Bell’s Space Traders; the Star Trek Franchise; female protagonists through the lens of race and gender in the Alien and Predator film franchises; science fiction in the Caribbean Diaspora; commentary on select African films regarding near-future narratives; as well as a science fiction/speculative literature writer’s discussion of why she writes and how. This book was published as a special issue of African Identities: An International Journal.