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Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek

2022; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 117; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2022.0139

2222-4319

Katie L. Stone,

Digital Games and Media

Reviewed by: Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek Katie Stone Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek. (New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2020. viii+254 pp. $34.95; £25.40. ISBN 978–0–8142–5596–4. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, editors Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek paint a picture of Afrofuturism as a multifaceted field whose parameters are hotly contested but whose practitioners remain united through a commitment to imagining futures ‘that allow for black cultural expression outside the white supremacist parameters that define consensus reality’ (p. 231). While previous studies of Afrofuturism, including Ytasha L. Womack’s Afrofuturism (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013) and Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones’s Afrofuturism 2.0 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), have tended to reflect the multimedia character of a field whose best-known figures—Sun Ra, Janelle Monae, the many-faced Marvel superhero Black Panther—move between music, film, and visual art, what Yaszek and Lavender have here demonstrated is that ‘the printed word remains an important lens through which to understand the full dimensions of Afrofuturism’ (p. 10). This collection highlights the work of Afrofuturist authors—authors who, like their musical and artistic counterparts, ‘have finally wrested control of their own future images’ (p. 1). Avoiding the work of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, the most prominent figures associated with literary Afrofuturism, the collection’s twenty-first-century focus has led to a welcome emphasis on rising voices in the field. In particular, the work of black women publishing today is foregrounded, with N. K. Jemisin, Chinelo Onwualu, and Nisi Shawl contributing to the introductory authorial round table while Sheree Renee Thomas, herself a leading editor of black science fiction, offers a chapter on those authors who ‘have not only been star-blazing a path for themselves but [. . .] are birthing a black womanist future for us all’ (p. 38). It is this future that Gina Wisker, Rebecca Holden, Jerome Winter, and Lisa Dowdall attend to in their chapters and which Elizabeth A. Wheeler, in her compelling reading of Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans (2013), extends beyond the strange worlds of Afrofuturist texts and into the lives of those ‘real-life Afroaquanauts’ navigating the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (p. 130). Another strength of this collection lies in the emphasis placed on Afrofuturism’s relationship to Africa. In the final section, authors grapple with the fact that, as Deji Bryce Olukotun puts it, ‘Western white and black writers alike have historically played fast and loose with African art and mythology in ways that are often unrecognizable to Africans themselves’ (p. 6). From Gerry Canavan’s discussion of the unstable geography of Wakanda to Nedine Moonsamy’s reimagining of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) as a science fiction text, the chapters in this section push on the geographical and conceptual boundaries of Afrofuturism. The collection is not without flaws. Some of the most interesting chapters, including Mark Bould’s work on the neglected author John M. Faucette, discuss twentieth-century texts, which somewhat undermines the book’s professed twenty-first-century [End Page 716] focus. I would also have been interested to see more work from emerging black scholars, who are under-represented here. However, the work which is included is indicative of the strength and variety of Afrofuturist scholarship. Particularly impressive is the authors’ willingness to emphasize the limitations of Afrofuturism. In their Introduction, Yaszek and Lavender present the black quantum futurism of Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips and the African-futurism of Nnedi Okorafor as valuable alternatives to Afrofuturism. Similarly, the authorial round table is filled with hesitations regarding Afrofuturism’s popular usage. It is not an over-eager defence of Afrofuturism that this volume presents, therefore, but a determination to challenge its conceptual efficacy. However, as author Nalo Hopkinson notes: ‘That’s the value of a filter. As an analytical tool, you can choose to use it selectively or to combine it with other filters. It all depends upon...