Book News: Afro-futurist Women

The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination

BY MAXINE LAVON MONTGOMERY

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781350124509

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/postapocalyptic-black-female-imagination-9781350124509/

Exploring postapocalypticism in the Black literary and cultural tradition, this book extends the scholarly conversation on Afro-futurist canon formation through an examination of futuristic imaginaries in representative twentieth and twenty-first century works of literature and expressive culture by Black women in an African diasporic setting.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The author demonstrates the implications of Afro-futurist literary criticism for Black Atlantic literary and critical theory, investigating issues of hybridity, transcending boundaries, temporality, and historical recuperation.

Covering writers including Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and Beyoncé, this book examines the ways Black women artists attempt to recover a raced and gendered heritage, and how they explore an evolving social order that is both connected to and distinct from the past.

Maxine Lavon Montgomery is professor of English at Florida State University. Her recent publications include The Fictions of Gloria Naylor (2011) and, as editor, Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (2017).