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.
