Abstract This article studies Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) to explore a concept that I term speculative architecture, which describes speculative, humanmade spaces and structures onto which authors layer social meaning. I argue that authors such as Solomon and Lai leverage the generic characteristics of speculative fiction to write social ideologies into the physical constructs of the world, posing a challenge to forms of oppression that rely on our understandings of such spaces, and their structuring logics, as natural and innate. In An Unkindness of Ghosts, Solomon transcribes histories of the Middle Passage onto the futuristic spaceship, challenging certain sciencefiction traditions that treat interstellar colonization as an idealized future for humanity without acknowledging the circumstances necessary for such a future to come about. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai critiques the racialized and gendered histories of inclusion and exclusion written into sub/urban borders and the mechanisms of control necessary to maintain those borders. Interestingly, both novels suggest gardens as potentially revolutionary interstitial spaces, in which the protagonists explore possibilities not prescribed by the material structures of oppression that otherwise dictate their lives. Thus, attention to speculative architectures highlights various possibilities for navigating narrative and material spaces, offering alternative epistemologies of both familiar and fantastical structures. Importantly, these characteristics are transferable across other works of speculative fiction, including not only sci-fi but also horror, fantasy, and magical realism, offering an interpretive lens that can be used to broadly articulate representations of spatiality, materiality, and sociality.
Abstract Despite its title, Gayl Jones’s novel Eva’s Man (1976) is not a story of a man. Instead, it is a disturbing account of the experiences of an abused woman, Eva Medina Canada, who grotesquely murders Davis Carter, a man she had met a few days prior. While exploring Eva’s Man from the perspective of Black women’s victimization is relevant and necessary, in this article, I read beyond a victim/perpetrator binary and focus attention on the male victim and female perpetrators that are seldom addressed in critical readings of this novel or in scholarship more generally. Drawing on Tommy J. Curry’s theorization of Black male vulnerability (Man-Not), I examine the (in)visibility of Black men as victims and women as perpetrators across the spectrum of intergenerational and interpersonal violence reproduced in society and reflected in the novel. I argue that reading the male character as not only a metonym for masculine aggression against women but also as a victim allows us to understand the novel more deeply. Not only does Davis stand for and remind Eva of her previous abusers but also he is a victim of the same cycle of violence in which Eva is victimized and in which all the characters, men and women, are somehow involved. Rereading the novel through the lens of Black male vulnerability enables us to see beyond racialized gender stereotypes and binaries and focus instead on the spectrum of violence itself to better understand its psychological, social, and political functions and ramifications.
