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  • 6 - Afro-Futurism/Afro-Pessimism

  • from Part II - Approaches
  • Edited by Joshua Miller, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction
    Published online:
    02 September 2021
    Print publication:
    23 September 2021, pp 123-141

  • Summary

    The second section foregrounds methodological approaches to twenty-first century fiction, starting with Candice Jenkins’s examination of Afro-Futurism and Afro-Pessimism as conceptual frameworks within which contemporary African American fiction has represented the past and present during “the Black Lives Matter era.” Discerning an inherently speculative quality to the two separate bodies of thought, Jenkins argues they share a “a certain radicalism–one inclined towards both building and destroying worlds.” This speculative radicality infuses the work of a remarkably broad range of writers, including N. K. Jemisin, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, with the generatively imagined restructured societies derived not from utopianism, but the negative affects of intractable historical racism.