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.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Mosquito Narrators and the Subaltern Voice, A Closer Look at JML 48.3

Romy Rajan notes that categorizing the novel The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell "is a challenge for the critic, because of the different genres it inhabits. It is historical fiction, domestic fiction, as well as science fiction, and won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020. The generic opacity is no accident—it is at one with the novel’s part-human, part-machine, and part-insect narrator, who also updates the meaning of the subaltern."

Read more here: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/mosquito-narrators-and-the-subaltern-voice-a-closer-look-at-jml-48-3/

His JML 48.3 essay is available FREE, linked in the post!

BOOK NEWS: Using Animal Studies tools to approach liminal figures in fiction

Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction

BY DAVID P. RONDO

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350356122

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/doing-animal-studies-with-androids-aliens-and-ghosts-9781350356122/

Exploring what can be learned when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.

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.

Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

"A great leap forward in the literary-theoretical approach to animal studies. Recommended for students of theory and fantastika. Heartily recomment" —Anthony Lioi, The Julliard School

"Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts provides a brilliantly subtle and compelling discussion of how thinking about entities that aren't animals can change our conceptions of animals by reconfiguring understanding of the human." —John Miller, University of Sheffield

David P. Rando is a professor in the Department of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He is the author of Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (Bloomsbury, 2022); Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology (Palgrave, 2017); and Modernist Fiction and News (Palgrave, 2011). 

Book News: Interviews with award-winning Afrofuturist Nalo Hopkinson

Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson

EDITED BY ISIAH LAVENDER III

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496843678

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Nalo-Hopkinson

A key figure in contemporary speculative fiction, Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson (b. 1960) is the first Black queer woman as well as the youngest person to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her Caribbean-inspired narratives—Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine—project complex futures and complex identities for people of color in terms of race, sex, and gender. Hopkinson has always had a vested interest in expanding racial and ethnic diversity in all facets of speculative fiction from its writers to its readers, and this desire is reflected in her award-winning anthologies. Her work best represents the current and ongoing colored wave of science fiction in the twenty-first century.

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 twenty-one interviews ranging from 1999 until 2021, Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson reveals a writer of fierce intelligence and humor in love with ideas and concerned with issues of identity. She provides powerful insights on code-switching, race, Afrofuturism, queer identities, sexuality, Caribbean folklore, and postcolonial science fictions, among other things. As a result, the conversations presented here very much demonstrate the uniqueness of her mind and her influence as a writer.

Isiah Lavender III is Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction. He is author of Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement; editor of Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, both published by University Press of Mississippi; and coeditor of Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century.

Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Mars

 

JML author Steve Gronert Ellerhoff discusses the background of his research on Ray Bradbury's anti-racism at work in two science fiction short stories, in a post for Indiana University Press, available HERE.

Ellerhoff's essay is now a read for FREE feature:

"White Supremacy and the Multicultural Imagination in Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Stories of Mars." Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 44, no. 4, Summer 2021, pp. 1-18.