Interdisciplinary and temporally expansive, the four papers on the panel represent diverse theoretical engagement and pedagogical perspectives, but all concern themselves within the import of black women to areas of theoretical and aesthetic speculation. Exploring Black women’s depictions of ecological crisis, of black childhood, as well as Black women theorists’ conceptualizations of the womb to the tomb, of social death, and the "wake" of slavery, the panelists addresses how black women trouble notions of what is to come and present the paradoxes and possibilities of Black speculative futures. The four presentations map how black women construct, revise, and critique a Black speculative future through narrative foreclosure, through temporal boomerangs, and spatial loopholes.
Crystal S. Rudd’s “Literary Endings and Speculative Futures in Gloria Naylor’s Fiction” arises from working groups and interviews with students after two different lectures about the contribution of black feminist speculative writing to social justice issues, namely immigration and mental health in communities of color. In response to the lectures’ emphasis on Afrofuturism and imaginative alternatives, students questioned the desire for transcendence that the discussion seemed to imply. Rudd examines how Gloria Naylor’s corpus of fiction mirrors the concerns of my students through epilogues that serve as both literary openings and speculative closures for questions of social justice, a double movement that represents the hard uncertainty of navigating the American socioeconomic system. Rudd examines how Naylor’s fiction is apocalyptic in its depiction of social closures: neighborhoods are doomed, loved ones die, and sanity dissolves; yet, as reflective as they are of social reality, her themes are mitigated by her narrative endings, which through structure and verb tense always leave a loophole of hope. Rudd concludes that Naylor’s fiction presents an example of black speculative writing that calls into question the blind hope or transcendence of imagining alternative futures.
Samira Abdur-Rahman’s “Disappearing Futures: Black Women Writers, Horror, and the Atlanta Child Murders” uses a comparative reading of Toni Cade Bambara’s final novel, and magnum opus, Those Bones are not My Child (2000) and Tayari Jones Leaving Atlanta (2002 ) to theorize how the authors fictionalize the Atlanta Child Murders to theorize an ecology of black childhood horror. The paper argues that Jones and Bambara use tropes of horror that connect them to aa constructed archive of Black eco-literature that documents the environmental burdens that Black children confront and contest in the “post-civil rights” era. Through scenes that collapse the boundaries between lost rural Black spaces and terrorized Black young bodies, both authors narrate the murders as an intergenerational trauma. Going further, the paper speculates that disappearance opens up a site to grapple with the disappeared black child and troubled narratives of futurism in the post civil rights discourses.
Dana Michelle Murphy in “Phillis Wheatley's Body” provides a rich reading of Black feminist literary history in her exploration of the U.S. black feminist poetic movement’s rise to national prominence in the 1970s. Her paper traces the movement’s creators struggle to celebrate their newfound success given the lasting "wake" of one of their earliest foremothers, a woman whose name doubly signified her transatlantic enslavement. Phillis Wheatley—or, as June Jordan preferred to call her, “Phillis Miracle”—was not an easy ancestor to "pass on." Murphy’s paper draws attention to one of the contested sites in which this dilemma was enacted: the body of the black woman poet. Murphy asserts that the 1970s mirrored the 1770s by way of the thinness of the line separating a life of literary fame and nullified abjection. While many black feminist poets were able to influence the institutionalization of their poetic work via their proximity to the academy, their bodies nevertheless bore the evidence of past lives spent laboring in moldy basements, unsafe factories, and white-patriarchal workplaces, often for little to no compensation. Murphy explores how these conditions expose how Wheatley’s body haunts the future black feminist poet's body.
Finally, Selamawit D. Terrefe “Carceral Speculations on the Black Maternal: Futurity and Foreclosure in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing” interrogates calls for a theorizing the import of foreclosure to constructions of Black speculative futurity. Terrefe’s papers questions to what degree speculation arises upon a future foreclosed, a horizon eclipsed by captivity – acknowledging that, perhaps, only within foreclosure can a necessary transvaluation of futurity occur. Terrefe investigates captivity as the property of both Black speculation and Black futurity. It utilizes the concept of the “captive maternal,” conceived by political theorist, Joy James, as a hermeneutic to read Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing: specifically, its depiction of the carceral as a state of specular affliction peculiar to Black subjectivity. Tracing the novel’s narration of a Black Mississippian family’s experience with three generations of captivity, disarticulating the reductive reading of maternity as the purview of female gendered subjects, this paper explores foreclosure—lyrical, spatio-temporal, and narrative—as the site par excellence for the Black captive maternal.