Warmest congratulations to Rhonda D. Frederick, whose Proof of Issues Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Style Fictions was printed this July by Rutgers College Press. This essential exploration of speculative fiction consists of chapters on the work of Barbara Neely, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colin Channer.
Meredith Gadsby (creator of Sucking Salt: Caribbean Ladies Writers, Migration, and Survival) writes: “With the brilliance of James Baldwin’s cultural criticism as a conceptual body, Frederick’s ‘fantastical blackness’ defies the restrictions supplied by colonial makes an attempt at diminishing African subjectivities. As a substitute, Frederick exhibits us how Black writers of fantastical blackness discover the contours of African identities made potential with out the dehumanization of the colonial mission. This contribution to scholarship on Black speculative fiction is a tour de pressure, for positive.”
Description: Proof of Issues Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Style Fictions is an interdisciplinary research of blackness in style literature of the Americas. The “fantastical” in fantastical blackness is conceived by an unrestrained creativeness as a result of it lives, regardless of each try at annihilation. This blackness amazes as a result of it refuses the bounds of anti-blackness. As put to work on this mission, fantastical blackness is an moral praxis that facilities black self-knowledge as some extent of departure moderately than as a response to threatening or diminishing dominant narratives.
Thriller, romance, fantasy, mixed-genre, and science fictions’ unrestrained imaginings profoundly talk this high quality of blackness, particularly right here by the work of Barbara Neely, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colin Channer. When black writers middle this expressive high quality, they make fantastical blackness out there to a broad viewers that then makes use of its possible vocabularies to reshape extra-literary realities. Finally, fashionable genres’ possible potentialities supply methods by which the made up could be made actual.
RHONDA FREDERICK is an affiliate professor of African and African diaspora research and English at Boston Faculty in Massachusetts. She is the creator of “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration.
For extra data, see https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/evidence-of-things-not-seen/9781978818064