As zombies become increasingly ubiquitous, one might ask the question posed by Edgar Wright in his 2006 film Shaun of the Dead: if a zombie outbreak were to occur in real life, would anyone even notice? John McPhail provides one answer to this question in his zombie high-school musical, Anna and the Apocalypse (2017), by parodying the morning of the zombie outbreak. Wrapped up in a musical number made possible by self-absorption and noise-canceling earbuds, the titular Anna blithely sings and dances her way to school (via a noteworthy cemetery), completely ignorant of the chaos around her, a biting satire of the tech-fueled isolation of modern teenagers. By mashing up high-school dramas, romantic comedies, movie musicals, and Christmas films with a zombie narrative, McPhail uses comedic parody to make the subgenre exciting and new once more. Taking a memorable sequence from Shaun of the Dead and expanding it into a feature-length film, Anna and the Apocalypse not only reinvents the stereotypical "zombie outbreak sequence" but also offers scathing cultural criticism about contemporary teen life and high-school communities.
Hidden in plain sight against the backdrop of popular culture, a deep ideological structure in the global imagination exists with respect to the zombie, a structure that is initially difficult to articulate and map out: racism. Starting with this main idea, this article sketches the ways that African American literary writers have utilized their zombie-filled "noirums" to symbolize the stakes of overcoming inequality. Quickly defined, a noirum is a "novum" refracted by race - the science fictional new thing and its racialized impact. In this regard, the zombie would be the new thing introduced in the storyworld, and the norium would be this new thing's influence on race in that storyworld. Even at the end of the world, when a zombie crisis ends society as we know it, when racial structures are surely destabilized with the emergence of said zombies, the outwardly broken racial structures remain firmly intact in terms of the viewing experience. Black people cannot live in streaming, film, or television contexts. Thus, this article offers a concentrated, if transitory, investigation of how various zombie screen narratives do not offer noirums, but rather, broadly speaking, colonialist Euro-American-oriented novums that embody both white fears and white desires. Finally, this article considers how Black creatives reimagine zombiehood (and, in general, undead stories) through the narrative modalities already mentioned while also unearthing new techniques when they are given creative free rein, especially in film and television.
Contemporary cultural conceptions of the future encompass two main approaches: an open future informed by multiple possibilities and a closed future that can be deterministically extrapolated from the present. The article explores the clash of the two approaches in Alex Garland's miniseries Devs (2020) and season 3 of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan's Westworld (2020). The shows feature quantum computers that gather large data sets about human subjects to analyze them and predict the course of their lives. This translation of human behavior into quantifiable data characteristic of surveillance capitalism can be used for manipulation and control of society by predetermination and inevitably raises questions about determinism and free will, cause-and-effect relationships, and the nature of reality. However, both shows propose a way out of the world of techno-domination by introducing an unpredictable element that creates an anomaly and unlocks the potential to regain agency and rewrite one's future.
In the first season of the speculative television show Our Flag Means Death (2022-23), the main character, Edward/Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) uses a series of names to signal and disavow identity aspects relating to his positionality as a queer, mixed-race leader. I combine close readings and theoretical approaches from sf studies, queer studies, and sociolinguistics to argue that these name-changing processes reflect Edward's ambivalence about his evolving identity, as well as his embeddedness in relationships with people who seek to affirm or dehumanize him. Edward's relationships with the three men closest to him showcase a range of naming practices that reflect racialized dynamics, recasting our real-world history through a speculative lens to comment on present-day intersectional identities.
This article considers how the relationship envisioned among race, technology, and the animal within The Creator (2023) enables the film to offer radical, anti-essentialist possibilities for the posthuman as a concept within sf. It does so by analyzing how the film configures scenes of cross-species kinship within its overarching narrative of robotic civil rights. After contextualizing The Creator within a lineage of allegorized alterity that has been viewed as simultaneously liberatory and restrictive by prominent scholars of race, I demonstrate how the film utilizes moments of anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric revolutionary violence to chart a trajectory toward species cosmopolitanism as a way of theorizing posthumanism. But this trajectory is complicated by the ways in which the film reinscribes techno-Orientalism on a formal level. The result, I argue, is a triangulated picture of race, technology, and the animal that gives rise to non-binary ways of conceptualizing solidarity not simply as a written theoretical exercise but as a speculative possibility grounded in paradoxicality and plasticity.
This article is a poetic inquiry into the Dark Fantastic (Thomas 2019), situating the roles occupied by Black women in fantastic fiction within a cycle spanning spectacle, hesitation, violence, haunting, and emancipation. I offer a collection of poems anchored in portrayals of Black women and girls in modern sf and fantasy (including Éile, or “The Lark,” in Netflix’s The Witcher: Blood Origin (2022), Nassun and Essun in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17), and both Queen Ramonda and Shuri in Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)). Though each poem is in conversation with one or more of these characters, I draw inspiration more broadly from their journeys and portrayals, rather than capturing specific plot points. In doing so, I seek to illustrate and explore the ways in which the Dark Fantastic manifests in a variety of settings, and to empower Dark Others even as they exist within marginalizing contexts and systems.
This article explores the transformative potential of Black girl protagonists in space operas, a genre traditionally dominated by Eurocentric, colonialist narratives. By analyzing the Africanfuturist novella Binti (Okorafor 2015) and the Afrofuturist novel A Song of Salvation (Dow 2023), this article highlights how the emancipatory practices of Black girl protagonists in space operas subvert conventional tropes and explore Black girlhood as a site of interstellar emancipation and agency. This paper utilizes dark matter as an analytical framework to examine how the protagonists navigate and dismantle oppressive systems, creating worlds that honor their existence and contributions. This approach challenges the genre's colonial legacy, emphasizing Black girls' emancipatory practices and speculative imaginations as foundational forces driving transformation and liberation in speculative fiction. Through this critical lens, the article underscores the importance of recognizing and celebrating the inherent worth and varied knowledges of Black girls in both literature and reality, positioning them as pivotal agents of change. This essay investigates the empowering nature of these narratives for the Black girl protagonist to examine how these stories redefine their roles in the cosmic realm and, ultimately, emancipate monsters - be they aliens or otherwise - as a vital intervention against the exclusionary violence of the Dark Fantastic Cycle (Thomas 2019).
Although underrepresentation in popular media remains an urgent area of inquiry, in recent years mass-media productions have created more representative images for youth of color. The Little Mermaid's 2023 remake marks the second Black actress (Halle Bailey) to assume the role of a princess in a live-action production in a Disney film, and the first Black performer of a princess role in a live-action theatrical release. Since media consumption and images greatly influence youth and their identity development, The Little Mermaid live-action film is an historic event for multiple generations of Black women and girls. This multi-study project uses qualitative mixed-method research to examine how this film's representation impacts Black girls and their mothers in the US Deep South. Using sista circle methodology (SCM) with Black girls from the third to seventh grades and their mothers/aunts following a group screening, and qualitative survey data, we explore how a Black Disney princess in a fantastic underwater world engages and disrupts Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's Dark Fantastic Cycle. Specifically, this article seeks to examine two main research questions: 1) how is Ariel reimagined as a Black princess? and (2) how are Black daughters and mothers engaging with this film with regards to their own complex identities?
Using Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's Dark Fantastic Cycle as a methodological tool, this article examines character Ruby Baptiste's central role in episode 5 of Misha Green's Lovecraft Country (2020). This article describes the Dark Fantastic as a practice Green exercises to expand the windows and mirrors (Toliver 2018) afforded to Black women in order to explore Ruby as an uptake of Thomas's Dark Fantastic Cycle. Paying attention to magical blurring and to the shifting of social categories, I argue that Ruby displays the generative possibilities of fantasy. By drawing attention to the ways that Ruby negotiates the Dark Fantastic Cycle and her own inner self, this article exercises the Dark Fantastic Cycle's capacity to critique violent, restrictive depictions of Black girls and women in speculative fiction, transfigure existing stories, and build new ones. I discuss categorical destabilization as a function of Ruby's unsettling of the categories of race, gender, and sexuality. This article makes the larger argument that privileging the story of the Dark Other demands that we not take social categories for granted or as fixed.
This article is a poetic inquiry into the Dark Fantastic (Thomas 2019), situating the roles occupied by Black women in fantastic fiction within a cycle spanning spectacle, hesitation, violence, haunting, and emancipation. I offer a collection of poems anchored in portrayals of Black women and girls in modern sf and fantasy (including & Eacute;ile, or "The Lark," in Netflix's The Witcher: Blood Origin (2022), Nassun and Essun in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy (2015-17), and both Queen Ramonda and Shuri in Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)). Though each poem is in conversation with one or more of these characters, I draw inspiration more broadly from their journeys and portrayals, rather than capturing specific plot points. In doing so, I seek to illustrate and explore the ways in which the Dark Fantastic manifests in a variety of settings, and to empower Dark Others even as they exist within marginalizing contexts and systems.
In her book The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2019), Ebony Elizabeth Thomas explains that privileging marginalized characters in her examination of the fantastic illustrates how "race and the imagination bend & mldr; texts at the seams, contorting both space and time" (11). This article considers how the Black girl protagonist's time-travel invention in the short and feature-film versions of See You Yesterday (2019) bends anti-Black inevitability and collapses the spatiotemporal divisions between past and present in order for Black life to persist. I argue that both films encapsulate the ways Black girls are made into the bearers of racial violence on two fronts: 1) Black girls are made vulnerable to both racialized and gender-based violence and erasure and 2) Black girls are situated as always already required to shapeshift and invent otherwise for survival. Thus the article meditates closely on two key questions: how does the absence of the Black girl's vulnerability to police violence in the feature film consolidate anti-Black logics that the short film tries to contest? And how does a recuperation of this earlier storyline make space to tell another story, akin to the one that the Black girl protagonist's disruptive time-travel device attempts to tell?
Deka - the Black girl protagonist from Namina Forna's The Gilded Ones - is a demon. After her blood runs gold instead of red during a purity ritual, she is labeled a demon by the men of Otera and cast out of her community, spirited away to a military training camp for other girls whose blood runs gold - alakis. She fights against her new dehumanized status. But, while Deka initially shuns the demon label, it is not until she begins enacting her demonhood - a distinct expression of her personhood - that she can subvert the expectations of her patriarchal society and rise above them, effectively freeing herself from the gendered confines of feminine respectability politics that polices all girls and women of Otera. This article aims to explain how Black girls, both real and imagined, defy, interrogate, and strategically embrace the labels forced on them to potentially free other girls and women from gendered mistreatment and violence to make change within their communities, societies, and imagined worlds.
Halle Bailey's portrayal of Ariel in Disney's live-action The Little Mermaid (2023) reimagines the beloved character within a racialized context, illuminating implications of race, identity, and belonging in fantasy narratives. Using Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's Dark Fantastic framework and Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Black feminist rumination that allegorizes sea creatures to grasp social movement strategy in Undrowned, this article examines how Bailey's vocal renditions of "Part of Your World" and "For the First Time" transforms these songs into profound meditations on Black liberation, memory, and ecological interdependence. This sonic phrasing analysis highlights how the subtext of race reshapes the songs' meanings, addressing themes of belonging, exclusion, survival, and emancipation.
A commonplace approach to watching a popular anime such as mangaka Akira Toriyama's legendary franchise Dragon Ball (1984-) is to skip the episodes the fans call "filler": the narrative byproduct generated by the slippage between the original source manga and the anime commissioned to concurrently adapt it. When the producers of an anime run out of manga to adapt, they must write episodes outside the main narrative that are self-consciously "forgettable"; as a result, many fans, viewing filler as a distraction from and even a danger to the canon storyline, invest an immense amount of labor into creating and consuming filler-free versions of the anime. This paper will examine the ways the practice of loving a show so much that one demands to watch less of it warps warm attachment into a litigious managerial practice that not only does violence to the anime but also to the fans themselves, who may similarly seek to eradicate filler in themselves, purifying the canon of their own private life. Borrowing from Marx's concept of the lumpenproletariat and from Vilem Flusser's concept of the envisioner, I call these fans who dispose of an anime's waste, rather than confronting waste as the fundament of the political economy that created that anime, lumpenvisioners. By examining the half-forgotten fictive lives of some of Dragon Ball's filler characters, this article proposes an alternative to this unhappy labor. It finds, in loving Dragon Ball the wrong way, in watching its filler, in leaving waste alone, both a critique of capitalist formations of the worthy and valuable as well as an argument for a more ethical, more sustainable fanhood.
Ostensibly works of first contact, or alien encounter narratives, Kevin and Matthew McManus's The Block Island Sound (2020) and Jordan Peele's Nope (2022) also function as salient expressions of ecohorror through an effect I call atmospheric invasion. Both films repurpose atmospheric elements (specifically, sound and clouds) as invasive intruders, thereby rendering a sensation that earthly atmosphere itself is somehow already alien. This approach to ecohorror paints an unsettling portrait of uncanny planetary behavior that appears to push back against its human inhabitants. Moreover, both The Block Island Sound and Nope register the racial currents that accompany and propel environmental disruption, connecting the threat of atmospheric capture with a colonial apparatus that aims to visualize and harness the environment for exploitative purposes.
This paper focuses on the TRON duology - Steven Lisberger's TRON (1982) and Joseph Kosinki's TRON: Legacy (2010) - ahead of the release of Joachim ROnning's TRON: Ares (2025) to situate the series in relation to the social dreaming of utopianism. As I'll demonstrate in a close reading of both films, there is a thorough rejection of both transhumanist posthumanism and, more broadly, the social dreaming of utopianism because this desire for radical social transformation is posited as the root cause for (cyber-)societal oppression. This rejection of utopianism, however, is not restricted to the cyberspatial Grid or Grid 2.0, but, instead, speaks to a present-day (largely Western) audience living in a twenty-first century where anti-utopianism appears firmly entrenched in the cultural imaginary. At the same time, the relevance of the TRON duology rests in part on the way the series extends an invitation for viewers to ponder whether an anti-utopian resignation that rejects utopian social dreaming is in our best interests. In this manner, the TRON duology remains an open invitation for today's audience to think more closely about the role of utopianism in the contemporary age.
Fredric Jameson's vision of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is one of the most influential constructs in the history of cultural theory. While Jameson's theorization would seem to depict postmodern culture as unable to mount any effective political critique of capitalism, Jameson himself (a consistently utopian thinker) has long argued that there might be exceptions, both as he wrote in 1991 and in his work afterwards. Yorgos Lanthimos's widely acclaimed Oscar-winning 2023 film Poor Things simultaneously functions as an eccentric exception to postmodernism and as a demonstration that a political form of postmodernism, complete with a utopian vision of a better future, is genuinely possible. This highly political film allows us to see the emergent world of modern capitalism through the eyes of a protagonist who is entirely free of the interpellating effects of Victorian bourgeois ideology, able to imagine a genuinely better world simply because she has never learned that such a feat is supposedly impossible. The result is a film with a socialist-feminist consciousness, a strong historical dimension, and a clear utopian vision, even while it retains many of the characteristics that identify it as postmodern.
