The past three decades have witnessed a sea change concerning both the production of, and academic interest in, Black speculative fictions. Afro-, African-, and Caribbean futurisms have garnered increasing scholarly attention through seminal works like those by De Witt Kilgore (2003), Womak (2013), Lavender (2019), Carrington (2016), Zamalin (2019), and dozens more over just the last three years. However, excepting where it blurs the boundaries of techno-futuristic contexts, less work has addressed Black interventions into the fantasy genre and the latter’s own, specific, worldbuilding codes. If science fiction's history was marked by the exclusion of authors of color, with New Wave writers like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany serving as exceptions which proved the rule, the fantasy genre, it could be argued, was even more whitewashed. Its attachments to European forbears in the Celtic Fae and Medieval- and early-Modern chansons de geste, as well as its penchant for representing minorities as “demi-human” others like elves, dwarves, and orcs, the fantasy genre, especially in its epic- and/or high- forms, led such representations race, when they did occur, to be drenched in reductive stereotypes. Nnedi Okorafor’s (2019) identification of herself as a writer of Africanjujuism, defining the latter as “a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative,” helped to reframe both twentieth-century Black fantasy worldbuilding and, especially, the more recent high-fantasy production of authors like Marlon James, Tomi Adeyemi, Kai Asante Wilson, NK Jemisin, and Okorafor herself, wherein fantasy worldspaces are conspicuously marked by influences rooted in African- and diasporic folklore.

Following recent work by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2020), Ekrow Eshun (2022) and others, this panel aims to direct its attention to Afrofantasy- or Black Fantastic texts by addressing the ways reconceiving fantasy worldbuilding from diverse perspectives broadens and/or resituates the formal elements of the genre.

Presenters will speak for twelve minutes each, leaving about half-an-hour for questions. Meg Dobbins leads off with a reading of Jamaican-American Lauren Blackwood’s YA gothic-fantasy rewriting of Brontë's Jane Eyre entitled Within These Wicked Walls (2021). Approaching Black literary adaptation as itself a form of fantasy worldbuilding, Dobbins shows how Blackwood rejects the stereotype of the mad subaltern woman to create an explicitly Black and anti-racist rewriting of the Victorian novel. Blackwood draws on pan-African diasporic discourses of “Ethiopianism” and American genres of the Black Gothic to explore the trauma of racialized violence as a dynamic intergenerational curse that must be exorcized and grieved intimately by a younger generation.

Next, Theo Joy Campbell, in “A Materialist Reading of Nnedi Okorafor’s Nsibidi Scripts Trilogy,” navigates the Naijamerican-author’s Nigerian setting provides her novel, Akata Witch (2015), with a distinctly African metaphysics through which to transform YA fantasy. In contrast to many YA texts with “chosen-one” protagonists, Campbell tracks how Okorafor initiates Sunny, the novel’s titular witch, into an animist, communitarian African worldview as just one fully integrated part of a community: no more important than any other.

Adena Rivera-Dundas follows with “‘Into the ocean again’: Black Feminist Underwater Epistemologies,” in which she addresses the recent boom of underwater mythology in African diasporic storytelling. Intertwined histories of African ocean deities and African American folklore have generated many representations of mer-life, Rivera-Dundas argues, making the underwater setting for these stories intrinsic to imagined communities developed from interwoven Black feminist epistemologies. Using the example of The Deep (2020), by the genderqueer Black novelist Rivers Solomon, Rivera-Dundas explores how contemporary Black feminist writers are engaging with Black mer-people and/or underwater environments to think through methods of Black feminist communication and community building.

Anchoring the panel, Kiana T. Murphy examines how African American fantasy author N.K. Jemisin’s narrative technique in The Fifth Season (2015) and Far Sector (2021) challenges the epistemological frame of fantasy but also sheds light on alternative models of worldbuilding that make visible how historical knowledge is produced, decimated, solidified, and subsequently unmade. Using Darieck Scott’s concept of “fantasy-acts” as a means of reading the form’s opposition to linear or real time, Murphy reads how Jemisin’s craft upends reader expectations of racialized and gendered forms within the fantasy genre.

This panel engages with the convention’s theme of “visibility” by drawing attention to recent moves towards Black representation in a genre which has traditionally rendered bodies of color invisible, aiming to renegotiate fantasy fiction’s forms and structures in the context of diverse authorial voices. The panel’s speakers, representing multiple races, genders, institutions, field concentrations, stages of professional development, and focalizing texts, promise a vibrant discourse on the topic.