A word at the outset of this report to note there will be spoilers for the Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. Also, this report is not comprehensive. Conversely, it is highly subjective and reflects what I personally found exciting and pertinent to my own areas of interest. This means mostly Jemisin, Nisi Shawl and Rivers Solomon, utopia, visionary fiction and decolonisation. As you’re reading the Just Utopias blog you’re hopefully here for this, so let’s crack on.
About the Women in the Black Fantastic conference
The Women in the Black Fantastic conference was an online international conference organised by the Science Fiction Foundation and hosted with Anglia Ruskin University, running from 7 -8 December 2024. Presenters came from Europe, the US and Japan, and there seemed to be about 40-50 attendees in total. I’ve written about the conference theme and title in a previous blog post.
The funny thing about online conferences is that, even though we’ve all been doing them since 2020, and even though the organisers were super helpful and even held tech support sessions ahead of the conference itself, the technology is still basically guaranteed to misbehave on the day. This is exactly what happened to I think every single presenter, including myself. Each presenter required an extra 3-5 minutes at the start to get their slides up and running, which really ate into question time at the end.
The format of the conference was the usual for an academic gathering: three presentations of 20 mins per panel, with a scheduled 30 mins for questions at the end. But after the tech hold ups and allowing for slight overrunning of the presentations, in reality there was only 15 mins left for Q&A. Then, because we were all remote, there was no opportunity to continue the conversation after the session. So overall the event was a sharing of papers, which were all excitedly received. But there was little actual conferring, which was a shame.
There were two streams running concurrently, but presentations were recorded, making it possible to catch up on any papers missed due to clashes. I was very grateful for this, as my own panel clashed with one on Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, which I desperately didn’t want to miss.
And so, on to the papers…
My paper
My own paper was about the themes of history/ancestry/memory, transcorporeality and diversity in Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. I discussed how these themes both unite these texts and differentiate them from traditional utopian fictions. I suggested these texts are representative of a new movement in literary utopias being led by women (and non-binary authors) in the Black fantastic.
My open question, which is still open so feel free to make suggestions in the comments, is what to call this movement? I toyed with ‘visionary utopias’ in my paper, which refers to Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown’s term ‘visionary fiction’. In Imarisha’s words:
‘visionary fiction’ is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power.”
Walidah Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood p.4
I’m not entirely set on using this term, not least because brown is not on board with utopia. In Emergent Strategy she says:
We have to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person. That’s the problem with most utopias for me: they are presented as mono-value, a new greener more local monoculture where everyone gardens and plays the lute and no-one travels… And I don’t want to go there!”
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy p.57
But I do feel it’s important to name the movement in order to recognise and celebrate it.
Papers on the Broken Earth trilogy
Salem James Martinez gave a brilliant paper on rage in the Broken Earth trilogy. They counselled us to forget the binary of good and bad, where anger is bad. Instead, protagonist Essun’s rage is energising and crucial for her transformation, whereas politeness would be sanitising and repressive. Even rage at its most extreme, namely when Essun kills her own child, has to be understood through an alternate framework, one which is specific to her experience as a Black mother. Were she to let her child be taken alive, she would be giving him up to slavery.
Martinez argued that Essun is ultimately successful over the course of the trilogy, with her earthly demise being another transformation and not a tragedy. Her anger at the world around her is transformative, not debilitating. Based on this, I asked Martinez in the Q&A whether they would see rage as utopian. They said yes, but with the caveat that rage is read differently in Black bodies. Black folks might be permitted to publicly express anguish, but not anger. Expressing anger is part of Essun’s healing, which shows how we need to be able to express rage to have full humanly autonomy. Rage, as such, is a condition of freedom.
Kay R. Barrett likened the three stages of Essun’s life to the Black female experience. In her earliest years as Damaya, she is socially conditioned to think of herself as less than human and learns to hide her true self. In her adolescence and young adulthood as Syenite she conforms as perfectly as she can to the rules and expectations of society as a survival strategy. Finally, as Essun she goes rogue, being unable to sustain the second state.
Martha Zornow interrogated the “gift” of an elite education bestowed upon Damaya (later Syenite) at the Fulcrum, showing this to be an imperial tool and far from benevolent. She also discussed Meov, the island on which Syenite and Alabaster meet their lover Innon, as a utopian site. I’d somehow forgotten about this utopia within the Broken Earth. There is also, of course, Castrima Under, the city within the geode that Amy Butt has written about as a utopian space.
A word on magic
Joy Sanchez-Taylor‘s paper on ‘Black Magic/Blood Magic’ warned critics of Black women’s speculative fiction not to mislabel African and/or Indigenous practices as ‘magical’. She stressed the importance of researching the culture first to avoid this mistake.
Keynote on speculative memoir: there is no one reality
Nyasha “Beau” Mugavazi’s keynote on speculative memoir was engaging and mind-expanding, as well as deeply personal and generous. One of his opening points was that subjectivity allows for multiple realities, whereas objectivity claims power and oppresses. Yet in sociology (his discipline) and academia in general, we’re ‘supposed’ to be objective. This resonated with me as I am currently writing the research plan for my PhD and thinking about how to be and write as an academic. It also recalled Matthew Docherty’s idea that treating a text as a resource to be mined replicates the extractive nature of colonialism, which I read about in an essay on ‘Post- and Decolonial Ecocriticism’ by Rebecca Duncan in the collection Contemporary Ecocritical Methods. So all thought-provoking stuff from the off.
Mugavazi posed questions to the audience to contemplate during his keynote. One was, “what forces shape my readings and reception of the work of Black women?”. I will continue to think about this but in the moment I noted thoughts about my gender and my ancestry, and about the need to undo aspects of my education and social conditioning and learn anew from Black women writers.
The main topic of Mugavazi’s keynote was speculative memoir. He explained this is memoir focused on the possibilities of the internal world, including ‘what-ifs’ and imagined scenarios. This immediately made sense to me – we do this all the time in our heads (at least I do…). So why not in a memoir? Mugavazi also spoke about how memories are speculations to an extent, on what things were probably like.
Other functions a speculative element may serve are making what is known to the neurodiverse mind accessible to the reader, or any other experience that falls outside of what is seen as ‘normal reality’. The need to conform to a ‘realistic’ writing style makes many experiences invisible, whereas storytelling can make these experiences accessible. This made me think of my own experience of anxiety and panic attacks, when I will be visualising all manner of catastrophes while the outside ‘reality’ is something much more mundane.
Mugavazi certainly convinced me on the exciting possibilities of speculative memoir, and creative non-fiction in general. Firstly, in allowing the freedom to choose other terms of engagement. And secondly, in exposing the truth that there is no one reality.
Decolonising the archives
The second day of the conference started with a presentation from Tom Dillon on the Decolonising SF collection at the University of Liverpool, where he is the Science Fiction Collections Curator. Dillon introduced the term ‘co-futurisms’, used to encompass Afro- African- and Indigenous futurisms. He suggested thinking of canonical science fiction as Whitefuturism, as a reframing exercise to see it as one stream alongside cofuturisms.
He talked about decolonisation as an intellectual movement with two aspects:
- Reframing knowledge/critiquing colonialism
- Offering ways of thinking that are beyond colonialism
The University of Liverpool is home to the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, which is the largest archive of English language science fiction held in Europe. Dillon described this collection, which falls under his remit, as largely an archive of Whitefuturism. He discussed his ambition to retrofit the collection to better represent cofuturisms.
Octavia Butler, Nisi Shawl and ‘change-the-world’ fiction
Mary-Antoinette Smith talked about her change in direction from 18th/19th Century British Literature to contemporary speculative fiction and framed this career change in relation to a quote from Octavia Butler: “I write to create myself”.
The title of Smith’s talk ‘To Be or Not Be Octavias?’ referred to an open letter from Nisi Shawl to the late Butler. In answer to the unwelcome question of who will be the ‘next Octavia Butler’, Shawl first notes Butler is irreplaceable. However, she proceeds to resolve:
we’re all going to have to be Octavias. […] At least in this sense: we’re going to have to write change-the-world fiction, like you.”
Nisi Shawl, ‘A Letter to Octavia Butler’
I hadn’t read Shawl’s letter before and am grateful to have had my attention brought to it. It may be that the answer to my own question about what to call these ‘visionary(?)’ utopias is ‘change-the-world fiction’.
Papers on The Deep
Rivers Solomon’s The Deep is based on a song by hip hop band Clipping (the band members are listed as co-authors). The Clipping song ‘The Deep’ was itself inspired by the mythical world created by techno musicians Drexciya. Andrew M. Butler extended this lineage further by suggesting Drexciya were inspired by Turner’s painting The Slave Ship. Butler also talked about the middle passage as origin myth for African Americans, rather than Mother Africa.
Claire Creedon suggested that The Deep is allegorical rather than speculative, and that this represents a divergence from Afrofuturism, the genre to which it is often ascribed. She also argued against the text being utopian as it does not present a vision of a liberated future. Instead, it represents a contemporary experience of healing past trauma. The placement of utopia within the temporal categories of past/present/future is something I’m interested in exploring further in my research.
Visionary fiction
Thankfully, despite technical problems, Chamara Moore was finally able to join their panel and we didn’t miss out on their paper on Black Trans visionary fiction. They led with a quote from Walidah Imarisha: “each of us is already science fiction walking about on two legs”. A reality where Black people live free was speculative fiction to their enslaved ancestors and this, Moore elaborated, is why science fiction is so important to Black people. It has enormous liberatory potential as a vessel for activism and a means to commit to joy and collective freedom.
Moore confirmed the term ‘visionary fiction’ was first coined by Imarisha in a Left Turn magazine article in 2010. This predates the Octavia’s Brood anthology (where I first saw her describe the term) by five years so this was a cool fact for me to find out.
Moore spoke about how fiction can help to make space for Black trans people in the real world through a reading of Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, which Butler herself described as her ‘pregnant man story’. They reiterated the condition of possibility offered to Black trans people by speculative fictions, which offer the potential for a way of living and being outside of what they were told they should be. Moore introduced the term ‘worldbending’ for worldbuilding at the level of the self.
Moore concluded by emphasising that Black folks, particularly queer, trans and gender non-conforming, are practising speculative work to envision themselves in a hetero-patriarchal world. This, Moore theorised, imbues their writing with an added layer of creation, transformation and possibility.
Reading list
To finish, this is the reading list I’ve come away with from the conference:
- Octavia Butler, Lillith’s Brood
- bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- Black Freedom Beyond Borders short story collection and podcast
- The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton
- Nisi Shawl, ‘A Letter to Octavia Butler’
- Walidah Imarisha, ‘Other Worlds are Possible: Visionary Fiction, Culture and Organizing‘
