The relationship of oppositional gender consciousness to narrative is the particular focus of this chapter’s attention to “gendered worlds” in postwar utopian and speculative writing. Tracing the resistance to the “defeating circularity” of gender binarism since the 1950s, this chapter surveys authors’ (re)figurations of sex and gender, as well as race, from the sex/gender fluidity in Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel Delany, to the queer kinships of contemporary queer and Afrofuturist writers. The chapter considers a cluster of feminist dystopian novels modeled after Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; forgetting Atwood’s narratological escape hatch in the “Historical Notes,” these novels are unable to imagine past the violent motive of binaristic gender ideology. Novels by Louise Erdrich and Lidia Yuknavich succeed in breaking that mold, offering queer futures that reimagine reproductive futurism in a new utopian register. The chapter concludes with the queer futures of brilliant African-American writers, including Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor.

Contending with Kei Miller’s declaration in ‘A Smaller Sound, A Lesser Fury: A Eulogy for Dub Poetry’ that the genre has died, this essay uses the lens of transition to demonstrate the continued vitality of this Jamaican-rooted performance and neoliterary genre that serves political and aesthetic needs of the variously disempowered. The essay suggests Miller misconceives what dubpoetry is, threatening its vital social work and doing a disservice to the older generation of dubpoets and their inheritors. Providing evidence that the majority of first-generation dubpoets continue to create new work, collaborate, develop new subgenres, and teach, the essay offers close readings of work by dubpoetry’s heirs. Jamaican dubpoetry band The No-Maddz, Jamaican-British spoken word poet Raymond Antrobus and Canadian dub inheritors Klyde Broox, d’bi.young anitafrika and Kaie Kellough are shown to effect presentational, generic, thematic/political and media transitions in and from dubpoetry.

This chapter engages with the thematic, formal, and linguistic breadth that characterises contemporary Black and Asian women’s poetry. It argues that the anthology continues to be an important platform for supporting, publishing, and disseminating Black and Asian women’s poetry, given the continuing dearth of publication opportunities for such poets. While there are continuities in style, form, and focus across the generations, there has been a significant shift away from a focus on identity towards more protean and fragmented forms. Language, migration, and diaspora remain central concerns, but are often more varied and diverse in their global reach, representing a wide range of experiences of crossings and arrivals, and of the melancholic un-belonging that often follows. The work of women poets across the generations is marked by a greater willingness to experiment with form, structure, and rhythm and to shift between experimental and expressive poetic registers with ease and confidence. In engaging a wide range of poets, this chapter prepares the ground for comparisons of similar preoccupations and concerns, charting continuities and discontinuities across the generations

Little is commonly said about sexuality in black and Asian British creative production, although diverse and often contradictory expressions of non-normative desire are easily traced throughout the twentieth century in the writing of, among others, McKay, Dawes, and Naipaul as well as Kureishi, Smartt, and Agbabi. Ranging across various literary forms to look at writers such as Kei Miller, Bernadine Evaristo, Diriye Osman, Neel Mukherjee, Thomas Glave, Jay Bernard, and Adam Lowe, this chapter raises questions about the interrogation, blurring, and translation of racial and sexual identities across a range of orientations and generations. It examines how texts have redefined and questioned the powerful stereotypes surrounding representations of black and Asian bodies, sexualities, and gendered identities. In so doing, it charts the uneven evolution and heterogeneous quality of queer black writing, framing it against Stuart Hall’s ‘refusal to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always “right on”’.