In conversation with Black cultural critics and theorists whose works interrogate Black ontology, the histories of anti-Blackness, and discourses of Black futurity--including Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, and Sylvia Wynter--our panelists explore the materiality and aestheticism of Black speculation. We propose to answer how the speculative carries Black life beyond the limits of our present imagination.

The session begins with Crystal Donkor’s analysis of African American print culture in the post-emancipation era. Her paper examines visions of Black futures embedded in nineteenth and early-twentieth century print culture. Donkor asks: How did African Americans living in what Christina Sharpe terms “the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery” contend with the “fact of Black death” and racial oppression? For these citizens, death via lynch law, the impacts of state violence, and economic destitution remained persistent threats to the future and dignity of Black lives in both the North and the South. Donkor’s presentation demonstrates that everyday voices in periodicals, routine magazine advertisements, and special features of publications during segregation challenged the limits of freedom by articulating the promise of Black survival.

The second panelist, Shaun Myers examines how the racial integration of science fiction (SF) led to mutations of Bildungsroman form and logic that would track Man's dissolution rather than its development. Myers shows how Octavia Butler's depictions of the dispersal of Blackness across humanity displace the liberal humanist subject, reconstituting the human animal around a collective investment in the terms of Black life. Myers theorizes this democratization of the Black condition as a kind of diasporic sequela that uninstalls Man as the synecdochic figure of human being. She shows how Butler’s early stories envision not human extinction but the liberal humanist subject’s deterioration—through embodiment, dispossession, and deposition.

Following Myers, Maleda Belilgne, turns to considerations of white fantasy, black horror, and the Baldwinian imaginary in the HBO series, Lovecraft Country. Part horror, part historical rendering, and interwoven with the themes, imagery, and discourses of African American literature, Lovecraft Country explores the spatial, visual, and corporeal regimes of postwar American society. The presentation focuses on the sonic texture of unreality and the spatial assemblages of race. Lovecraft Country uses a recording of Baldwin’s voice—a clip of his 1965 debate with William Buckley—to register a soundscape of black resistance that extends from his searing critique of the American Dream, and its “system of reality,” to geographies of race in our contemporary era. Belilgne shows that genres of the Black supernatural, fantastical, and unreal are responsive to the spatial crises generated by the structural and symbolic apparatus of white supremacy. She contends that Black speculative art reimagines the limits of space to fashion more livable presents and to condition the future.

The panel concludes with Andrew Belton’s addending the catalogue that begins Hortense Spillers’s essay on Black womanhood with a millennial figuration that uniquely situates the “disappearing act/s” of Black girlhood, i.e. “BlackGirlMagic.” Analyzing Janelle Monáe’s cultural investment in speculative performances that idealize queer Black femme futurity, the paper sustains notions of “disappearance” and “reappearance” with regard to Black girls (and girlhood) “gone missing” in the historical archive to argue that “ungendering” the Black female subject happens when the inter- and the intra- of racial and sexual violence meet--a space Spillers describes as a “materialized scene of unprotected female flesh.” BlackGirlMagic, then, functions in relief of the violence that produces black(woman)ness in that scene, by engendering performances of girlhood as a “secret language” of the fantastic, à la magic, or as the futurity around which the Black child/girlhood congregates.

These twelve-minute papers will be followed by a fifteen-minute audience question and answer period. Given the interdisciplinary nature of our topic, and its centrality to contemporary debates in Black Studies and African Diaspora Literary Studies, we anticipate a lively discussion.