Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women’s Fiction

How do Black women writing speculative fiction explore the use of memory as a potential strategy for liberation? In Black Speculative Feminisms, Cassandra L. Jones looks at the writings of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Rasheedah Phillips, and Nnedi Okorafor to chart those moments where characters harness, or fail to harness, the power of memory. These instances transform memory-individual and collective, bodily and archival-from passive recollection into direct or indirect social action. Taking a Black feminist approach, Jones addresses several emancipatory themes within Afrofuturism: the decolonization of time that can be found in fiction employing non-Western and nonlinear expressions of time, exploring futurity and the projection of a full range of expressions of Black humanity into anticipated futures, and imagining new worlds and novel approaches to old problems. Drawing on critical fabulation and restorative justice, she forwards restorative fabulation as the mechanism by which speculative fiction offers a healing site for authors and readers to process generational trauma while imagining more equitable futures.

Cassandra L. Jones is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, speculative fiction, technology, and memory.