ABSTRACT: This essay examines how Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy mobilizes race, ecology, and regional identity through the figure of the American South as an “internal other.” While VanderMeer clearly responds to the racial politics of the contemporary speculative fiction market, he abstracts race from its historical foundations within the world of the trilogy. Drawing on debates between new materialist and Black feminist scholarship, the essay ar-gues that race functions as a constitutive yet marginalized element of the trilogy’s worldbuilding. Through institutional diversity, mixed-race identity, and representations of whiteness and domestic terrorism, VanderMeer reframes race as a weird social ecology without fully confronting the material histories and power structures that produce racial difference.
ABSTRACT: Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Sonny Blount, known professionally as the jazz musician, composer, and mystic Sun Ra (1914–1993), moved north in 1945, part of the Great Migration. His insistent claim that he had lived on Saturn encapsulates his estrangement from his home region. While Sun Ra’s compositions, occultist writings, and interviews addressed the potential tran-scendence of Black people, his body of work is distinguished by a palpable mel-ancholic undertone. Sun Ra’s idiosyncratic take on the blues, along with his “saturnine” demeanor and refusal to portray his envisioned outer space as a post-racial Utopia, reflect an alienation rooted in the tightly constrained, creatively stifling Jim Crow South.
ABSTRACT: Michael Bishop’s Urban Nucleus cycle imagines a domed Atlanta in the mid-twenty-first century. Where Atlanta’s raced and classed social structure has created a horizontal geography of segregated suburban sprawl, Bishop’s imagined Atlanta houses the entire population of Georgia in a vertical megastructure, ranging downward from surface towers to catacombs. Over the course of three generations, the careful urban planning that produced “At-lanta UrNu” produces neither a utopia nor a dystopia but a complex community that reflects the familiar resilience of Atlanta’s citizens.
ABSTRACT: The new southern studies has shown that the field’s foundational concepts, such as region and the folk, are more speculative than they initially appear. This essay extends those efforts by exploring how regimes of economic, aesthetic, and academic speculation shape the circulation and legacy of the blues. It argues that two contemporary novels—Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001) and Hari Kunzru’s White Tears (2017)—employ speculative techniques to reflect critically on the blues and its afterlives. These novels demonstrate how competing regimes of speculation produce complex mappings of the South and accounts of the blues that challenge racial capitalism’s efforts to monopolize discourses of progress and modernization.
ABSTRACT: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s 2021 novella My Monticello depicts the occupation of Monticello by a diverse group of refugees of the near-future fleeing both climate disaster and white supremacist marauders. This essay reads Johnson’s fiction as a deliberate revision of Jeffersonian liberalism: staged in one of the most significant theaters of American iconography, Johnson’s text depicts the transhistorical conflicts that ensue when expressions of both person-hood and ownership collide with the plantation necropolitics of American slav-ery. This essay also demonstrates how My Monticello ’s literal and figurative amendments to Notes on the State of Virginia expand the speculative range and expressive potential of the category of southern literature.
