Cover by Karo Duro
Black Women’s Contemporary Speculative Fiction features Black feminist artists, academics and activists analyzing and arguing how contemporary Black femme fiction writers speak so insistently and precociously to our current world. This is a world of racist, misogynist and classist chaos, war, internecine politics, climate change, and assorted kleptocracies at both the state and multinational level. First imagined and misunderstood as a Western genre that pits Enlightenment rationality against the ghosts of irrational prejudice and supernatural beliefs, science fiction/speculative fiction has effectively been broadened by authors such as Octavia Butler, Akwaeke Emezi, Rivers Solomon, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. They produce new epistemologies and analytical tools which operate effectively at the level of sophisticated critique and knowledge exploration.
As our contributors show, contemporary Black femme speculative fiction takes up the questions facing our world right now: of living and surviving climate change and global disaster, the ethics and the politics of care and reproduction, the challenge of the archive—and even the polyvalent educational role speculative fiction can play. With their own creative intellects, they aptly bring out how these writers of great imagination and foresight provide not so much a way “forward”, as a means of existing in the “right now”. After all, the future is not some bordered spacetime that lies just before us. It is in the process of being shaped by us right here, right now.
From calls to expand our living, remembered and forgotten Black archives, to reckoning with our current spacetime and contingent, precarious futures, this special issue engages with the Black feminist body writ large in our intermingled worlds of past, present and future.
Susana M. Morris & Michelle M. Wright
Guest editors
For a limited time, download and read the introduction and “Bearing the Burden of Posthuman Reproduction in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” and Wild Seed,” by Marquita R. Smith for free.
Personal subscriptions are $46 USD and include 4 issues. You can subscribe to our 54th volume here. A limited quantity of print back issues are available in our store. Small stock update coming soon.
The rest of our 2024 volume will include Afrobeats’ Lower Frequencies, and Ceddo: Black British Independent Film
