I will be giving a paper as part of this year’s conference of the Science Fiction Foundation. The topic for the conference, which will be held online on 7-8 December 2024, is Women in the Black Fantastic. Full details of the programme and a link to buy tickets can be found here.
In the Black Fantastic
The phrase ‘In the Black Fantastic’ was coined by writer and curator Ekow Eshun. His exhibition of this name at the Southbank Centre featured “visionary Black artists exploring myth, science fiction and Afrofuturism”. In his curator’s tour, Eshun explains how these artists are creating “new cosmoses of possibility”.
My paper will focus on contemporary Black women and non-binary authors creating new possibilities in the genre of utopia. Below is my proposal in full.
Visionary Utopias: Recognising a Movement
The history of utopia is intricately linked with colonialism. More’s genre-founding Utopia (1516) was in partinspired by Vespucci’s accounts of the colonisation of America.[1] 500 years later, we are experiencing an explosion in utopian science fiction led by Black women and non-binary writers. Key texts include N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), Nisi Shawl’s Everfair series (2016-2024) and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), The Deep (2019) and Sorrowland (2021).
My paper will explore ways in which these new utopian works disrupt the genre’s inherited colonial structures of power. For example, through their focus on history, memory and ancestry as opposed to utopia’s conventional ‘blank slate’ approach, and their diverse casts, which contrast with the homogenous class of citizens inhabiting traditional utopias.
I am tentatively calling this new movement ‘visionary’ utopias, borrowing a term from Octavia Butler scholars Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. Imarisha explains: ‘“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.’[2]
The aim of this paper is to recognise, name and celebrate a movement currently rewriting the literary genre of utopia to address contemporary concerns, including racial and climate justice.
[1] Karl Hardy, ‘Unsettling Hope: Contemporary Indigenous Politics, Settler-Colonialism, and Utopianism’, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 2:1(2012), 123-36, p.125
[2] Walidah Imarish and adrienne maree brown (eds), Octavia’s Brood (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), p.4
