Abstract.: Black speculative art often seeks to question white European/ American narratives about both the past and the future, reimagining those narratives in a variety of ways. Similarly, Black feminist epistemology outlines criteria of knowledge that have been ignored by the white-dominated academy. This paper investigates Eve L. Ewing’s collection of poems, 1919 (2019), from both perspectives. In many ways, the collection uses a Black feminist perspective to retell the story of the 1919 Chicago race riot that erupted after Eugene Williams, a Black child, was killed for accidentally entering the de facto white side of a Lake Michigan beach. The book responds to the seven-hundred-page report written by six white and six Black men after the riot, titled The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922), using excerpts of the book as epigraphs that are then challenged and added to in the poems that follow. Ewing speculatively rewrites history, adding fictionalized details and juxtaposing history with more overtly speculative poems set in a variety of other time periods. 1919 is thus a text that includes speculation in Black feminist epistemology and broadens the typical conception of speculation as narrative fiction to include lyric poetry. Ultimately, Ewing’s refusal to merely retell a coherent historical narrative, choosing instead to mix and match time periods and rely so heavily on speculation, questions the privileging of narrative both in Black feminist epistemology and in the speculative arts. Instead, 1919 asserts that nonnarrative speculation can be also an effective tool to create knowledge, interrogate injustice, and imagine just futures.
Abstract.: Frederick Douglass’s first speech to be printed as a pamphlet in the US has a surprising title, Abolition Fanaticism in New York (1847), and location, Baltimore. Prepared by and for unreceptive readers, the anonymously produced pamphlet reframes Douglass’s speech, which justifies his criticizing of US slavery while abroad, as evidence of the excesses of abolitionist rhetoric. The paratexts are designed to undermine Douglass in particular while lampooning organized abolition in general. Yet, remarkably, the pamphlet reproduces the speech in its entirety without editorial interruption. While it may be tempting to discount the pamphlet as mere evidence of the antebellum South’s hostility to abolition, what other insights might it reveal? This article tells the story of how Douglass’s 1847 speech went from the keynote address of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s anniversary celebration to stenographic printed in the reform-minded New-York Tribune to unauthorized reprint. Although this curious print afterlife has received little scholarly attention, it contributes to our growing understanding of Douglass’s variegated readerships and of his own development as an agent in the print realm, attentive to the possibilities afforded by speech-to-periodical-to-pamphlet transference.
Abstract.: Theories of the everyday tend to redirect critical attention away from the kind of spectacular events we associate with trauma toward the routine, taken-for-granted dynamics of the ordinary. Black breathlessness, however, challenges that opposition. Adopting a deadpan narrative voice that offers a radical leveling of the everyday and the traumatic, Raven Leilani’s short story “Breathing Exercise” uses its protagonist’s chronic breathlessness to interrogate the relationship between materiality and metaphor. By situating it in the context of recent African American literature, this essay traces some of the tensions that emerge from breathing in an atmosphere where, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “antiblackness is pervasive as climate.”
Analyzing Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren through the lens of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, this article argues that amnesia, often read as an aspect of trauma and repression, can also engender a science-fictional "sense of wonder" toward a Black future. Where traditional SF invokes this sublime wonder through what Darko Suvin coined the novum-the technological or otherwise material invention that transforms the world of the text, estranging it from the material moment of its writing-experimental African American SF texts, and these two works in particular, use amnesia to provoke a sense of wonder concerning the discursive formation of identity and one's nonteleological yet never static transformation into new states of being. Building on Jack Halberstam's queering of forgetfulness in The Queer Art of Failure, this article highlights how amnesia in these texts is less a function of the escapism of SF fantasies than it is a necessary cognitive stance demanded by Afrofuturism's critical function.
Anne Spencer has long been considered one of the most perplexing and hard-to-categorize figures of African American poetry. How is she both unconventional and representative? Spencer has been called both politically engaged and reclusive-someone who rarely socialized, yet whose door was always open to visiting race leaders. By applying abstract modifiers such as "unique"-or relegating her writing to the period of her youth-critics for decades have struggled to position and fairly assess Spencer's poetry. Has the delimiting Harlem Renaissance association prevented full recognition of the complete and complex scope of Spencer's influence and significance? This essay proposes a fresh and transhistorical context for Spencer that conjoins sex and race-the areas that critics often feel she avoids. In firm disagreement, this article analyzes the complex stylistics that makes her poems so challenging to describe and categorize to reveal the social and political engagement at the heart of her poetic oe uvre. A socially committed poet throughout her life, Spencer's dialogues with poets of varied ages and eras place her in a tradition of Black artists who use creative means as vehicles of protest to break down stereotypes of sex and race.
Claude McKay's position within the Harlem Renaissance and Black modernism is solidly assured; however, much of his broad understanding is as a poet leaving his prose and novels of the late 1920s understudied. This article uses the central figure of McKay's 1929 novel, Banjo, to follow the diasporas present within the instrument, main character, and the book itself. Through such an exploration a deeper understanding of the complexities of McKay's artistic endeavors within the Black Atlantic and the ways Black artists maneuver within the capillaries of modern capitalism can be achieved.
