BOOK NEWS: The evolution of Black speculative fiction and philosophy

Afrofuturism and World Order 

By Reynaldo Anderson 

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5955-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215944.html

In Afrofuturism and World Order, Reynaldo Anderson delves into the evolution of Black speculative thought and Afrofuturism from the early twentieth century to the present day. By locating Afrofuturism within an African geography of reason, he situates the past, present, and future of people of African descent at the intersection of speculative philosophy, science fiction, futurology, artificial intelligence, climate change, and geopolitics. Historically, Afrofuturism theorized futures for Black Americans through merging their lived experiences with science fiction, technology, music, and art. 

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.

Drawing from adaptations in Black culture and speculative thought during the Cold War, Anderson addresses the shifting focus of the genre from American to transnational, as well as the implications of modern existential threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. By tracing the Black speculative tradition from its overlaps with Africana esotericism and certain African diaspora regions, to its intersections with astroculture and modernism, to the works of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Octavia Butler, to the aesthetic politics of the Black Speculative Arts movement, and beyond, Anderson illuminates how Afrofuturism participates in an increasingly multipolar world.

“Anderson situates Afrofuturism within the long history of African philosophy, going beyond traditional literary studies to offer new ways to consider questions of justice, equality, and liberation. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the intellectual power and political depth of the Black speculative imagination.” —Alex Zamalin, author of Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism

“Anderson locates the limitations of modernism as a European ideology and then uses established principles of Africology to propose new approaches to both critical and creative analysis. Afrofuturism and World Order is essential reading for Black and African studies scholars and will become a bedrock text for graduate instruction.” —Walter D. Greason, Dewitt Wallace Professor of History, Macalester College

Reynaldo Anderson is associate professor of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University and coeditor of, among others, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art + Design, and Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent. He is also the editor of The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies.

BOOK NEWS: The entwined relationship of movement and writing for Black women authors

The Souths in Her: Black Women Writers and Choreographers and the Poetics of Transmutation

By Nicole M. Morris Johnson

Columbia UP, 2026

ISBN: 9780231219686

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-souths-in-her/9780231219686/

Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. Yet Black women writers, artists, choreographers, and performers have contested pervasive political, cultural, and discursive silencing by drawing on the traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths: the Southern United States and the Caribbean, as well as Africa.

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.

In The Souths in Her—a phrase borrowed from Ntozake Shange—Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. She analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Shange, among others. Morris Johnson demonstrates that although the central role of motion reinforced perceptions of primitivity that relegated Black women and the South to a space outside modernity, it was in fact crucial to their formal innovations. For these writers and choreographers, unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths catalyzed formal experimentation and movements for liberation. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, The Souths in Her offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.

"The Souths in Her offers an important exploration of how Black women artists have used self-expression to counter misperceptions about them and their legacies in the South. Through rich analysis of Black women writers and choreographers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Maryse Condé, Ntozake Shange, and Jamaica Kincaid, alongside contemporary artists like Allison Janae Hamilton, Urban Bush Women, and Akwaeke Emezi, this book showcases how they achieve new “expressive horizons” and chart new territory to move freely." —Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry

"Taking her title from Ntozake Shange, Nicole M. Morris Johnson explores various Souths: the worlds that Black women artists, primarily writers and choreographers, made to counter silencing. Authoritative and beautifully written, The Souths in Her understands Black women’s art as emancipatory in its broadest and bravest forms, delving into feminist cultural expression out of the Middle Passage to illuminate its creative power and impressive diasporic reach." —Thadious M. Davis, author of Understanding Alice Walker

"The Souths in Her is a brilliantly conceptualized examination of women writers and artists of African descent from the Caribbean and the United States whose contributions boldly confront confining narratives that have typically centered Black masculinity. Morris Johnson's beautifully written book refines and expands these methodologies to center Black women, Africa, and its diasporas. An outstanding and exciting achievement in Southern studies." —Riché Richardson, author of Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body

Nicole M. Morris Johnson is an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

BOOK NEWS: A Black feminist spiritual history

We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism

BY MARINA MAGLOIRE

U of North Carolina P, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-4696-7489-6

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674896/we-pursue-our-magic/

Drawing on the collected archives of distinguished twentieth-century Black woman writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, Marina Magloire traces a new history of Black feminist thought in relation to Afro-diasporic religion. Beginning in the 1930s with the pathbreaking ethnographic work of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and ending with the present-day popularity of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices among Black women, she offers an alternative genealogy of Black feminism, characterized by its desire to reconnect with ancestrally centered religions like Vodou.

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.

Magloire reveals the tension, discomfort, and doubt at the heart of each woman’s efforts to connect with ancestral spiritual practices. These revered writers are often regarded as unchanging monuments to Black womanhood, but Magloire argues that their feminism is rooted less in self-empowerment than in a fluid pursuit of community despite the inevitable conflicts wrought by racial capitalism. The subjects of this book all model a nuanced Black feminist praxis grounded in the difficult work of community building between Black women across barriers of class, culture, and time.

"Magloire's examination is wholly unique to the field and makes a significant treatment that is even more necessary now as the study of Black women's spiritual practices has again come into vogue. A wonderfully complex and well-researched book."—Kinitra Brooks, Michigan State University

"An engaging and thoroughly researched book that brings together well- and lesser-known figures to explore religion, spirituality, and feminism among African American women writers, artists, and scholars. For scholars interested in gender, religion, diaspora relations, and comparative diaspora studies, We Pursue Our Magic is essential."—Tiffany Patterson, Vanderbilt University

Marina Magloire is assistant professor of English at Emory University.

BOOK NEWS: Afro-diasporic fiction confronts the resurgence of biological racism

Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction: Race, Kinship, and the Passion for Ontology

BY NICOLE SIMEK

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781501377655

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/alchemies-of-blood-and-afrodiasporic-fiction-9781501377655/

Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction focuses on the resurgence of biological racism in 21st-century public discourse, the ontological and material turns in the academy that have occurred over the same time period, and how Afro-diasporic fiction has responded to both with alternative visions of bloodlines, kinship, and community.

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.

In thinking through conceptions of race, ethnicity, and materiality at work within both humanities research and popular culture, Nicole Simek asks how the figure of alchemy – that semi-scientific, semi-mystical search for gold and the elixir of long life – can help scholars address the epistemological and affective investments in blood, bloodlines, and genetics marking both academic and mainstream discourses. To answer this question, Simek examines neo-plantation and Afrofuturist narratives, Afropessimist interventions, museums and public memory projects, and direct-to-consumer genetic testing services in the French Caribbean and the United States. This comparative approach to cultural production helps pinpoint and better understand the intersections and divergences between scholarship trends and troubling features of a broader Zeitgeist.

"This is a refreshing and original reflection on racial theory and contemporary cultural production that speaks aptly to the tensions and anxieties of our times while demonstrating how literature and film can offer salutatory alternatives to ongoing racial injustice." --Jane Hiddleston, professor of literatures in French, Oxford University

"Nicole Simek's Alchemies of Blood and Afro-Diasporic Fiction offers a trenchant critique of cultural and political bloodlines in contemporary Black thought, In a bold series of case studies, from genealogical analysis to a wonderful juxtaposition of work by Whitehead and Condé, Simek provides fresh thinking on a passion for the real in Black writing. An impressive contribution." --Peter Hitchcock, professor of English, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

 

Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA. Her latest books include Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life (2016) and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (2008). She is also co-editor of Francophone Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020) and translator of Maryse Condé's The Belle Créole (2020).

Book News: creative women of the Iranian diaspora

 Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora

BY MEHRANEH EBRAHIMI

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815636557

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/104/women-art-and-literature-in-the-iranian-diaspora/

Does the study of aesthetics have tangible effects in the real world? Does examining the work of diaspora writers and artists change our view of “the Other”? In this thoughtful book, Ebrahimi argues that an education in the humanities is as essential as one in politics and ethics, critically training the imagination toward greater empathy. Despite the surge in Iranian memoirs, their contributions to debunking an abstract idea of terror and their role in encouraging democratic thinking remain understudied. In examining creative work by women of Iranian descent, Ebrahimi argues that Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Parsua Bashi make the Other familiar and break a cycle of reactionary xenophobia. These authors, instead of relying on indignation, build imaginative bridges in their work that make it impossible to blame one evil, external enemy. Ebrahimi explores both classic and hybrid art forms, including graphic novels and photo-poetry, to advocate for the importance of aesthetics to inform and influence a global community. Drawing on the theories of Rancière, Butler, Arendt, and Levinas, Ebrahimi identifies the ways in which these works give a human face to the Other, creating the space and language to imagine a new political and ethical landscape.

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.

"This is an ambitious, sharply political argument about the urgent stakes of representation that maintains a laser-sharp focus on detail when discussing the individual works in both their textual and visual registers."—Iranian Studies

"Ebrahimi’s book adds to expanding the field of Iranian diaspora studies, as it tackles the relationship between aesthetics and politics through a liberatory lens. Given our current political moment, works such as Ebrahimi’s are a welcome addition to thinking through the subversive potential of cultural representation in the Iranian diaspora."—International Journal of Middle East Studies

"This book makes an important contribution to cultural studies in that it steers us away from only making a paranoid critique of our world and instead reaches to the possibility of ethical democracy."—Dina Georgis, author of The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East

Mehraneh Ebrahimi is assistant professor of English at York University where she teaches courses in diaspora and world literature. Her research focus is on Middle Eastern literature in light of the ongoing "war on terror."