Toni Morrison argued in a 2015 Nation essay that “this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” Even more apt now, Morrison’s words inspire this special session, as does C. Brandon Ogbunu’s argument in a 2020 Wired essay (that gives this session its title): “the Black experience is defined by a historical struggle for existence, the right to live, to be considered a person, to be afforded basic rights, in pursuit of (political, social, economic) equality. Because of this, the Afrofuturist can see the parts of the present and future that reside in the status quo’s” inequalities.

Afrofuturism, an umbrella term that includes the speculative, comprises cultural production and intellection that imagine greater justice and a freer expression of a range of Black subjectivities in the future or in alternative places or realities. Afrofuturism and Black Speculative arts constitute one of the most prominent and powerful areas of Black Studies now. Scholars in the field have turned again and again, for example, to Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, which models the exposure of systemic inequities via the time travel of its main character, Dana, an African American woman living in 1976 who is yanked back to 1815 and to enslavement. The novel insists that readers confront “genre, identity, and [literal and] literary histories” in order to arrive at an ethical activism in the present. Like Kindred, the Black Speculative challenges us to create a new world that may bear little “family resemblance” to our troubled present in the US.

This session will argue that the Black Speculative advances ideological and aesthetic work that challenges the “status quo,” particularly the forces of inequity that operate not only within the regressive current presidential administration but also within the progressive impulses of liberal nationalism. We will show how Black Speculative texts re-imagine race, identity, and economic, technological, and political structures in ways that may loosen the grip of this “progression-regression paradox.” Our special session will advance the ongoing scholarly conversation on this topic by situating the Black Speculative in relation to the contemporary post-Civil Rights backlash. We will thereby extend the late Richard Iton’s argument in his landmark 2008 book, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, which offers a framework through which to understand the political possibilities inherent in the Black Speculative in the post-civil rights era of the 1970s and 80s. We also extend the scholarly conversation around climate change and bioethics, relatively new areas of Black Studies, to the Black Speculative.

Jermaine Singleton’s “Until History Stops Repeating Itself: New Directions in Black Speculation After Civil Rights” uncovers a paradigm for rethinking what constitutes “Black speculation” and, moreover, its reconstitution as it rubs against contemporary bioethical debates. Daylanne English’s “Marvels of Inventiveness: The Power of Black Feminist Speculative Technologies” argues that Black women’s speculative scholarship and art, through innovative content and form (for example, Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer) enable the imagination and creation of a more just world in the present. Susana Morris’s “Prophet of the Possible: Octavia Butler's Legacy” argues that Butler’s Parable series eerily anticipates our current social and ecological crises while demonstrating how Afrofuturist speculation functions as both diagnostic and restorative practice. Our three presenters represent a diversity of institutions: liberal arts college, public research university, and regional private university.

This session supports the Family Resemblances presidential theme by honoring the work of Black speculation after Civil Rights and tracing its power to loosen the grip of current oppressive political, economic, and technological forces. All three presentations show how Black Speculative cultural production identifies persistent and damaging historical patterns while foregrounding potentially sustainable communities rooted in collective care and offering practical blueprints for healing our fractured world, as in Butler's novels. This session thereby makes a strong argument for the utility of the Black Speculative to “reimagine acts of comparison and relational thinking” in order to build more inclusive, pluralist futures. We believe this session’s argument for the utility of the arts and literary and cultural analysis to be broadly applicable across the arts and literary studies, just as Morrison’s essay suggests; or, as Kevin Quashie writes in Black Aliveness (2021), “the aesthetic makes the ethical possible.”