Black Atlantic Speculative Fictions: Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Nalo Hopkinson

ISBN-13: 9780415804417 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 194 str.

Ingrid Thaler

Opis

Since the 1980s, an increasing number of black writers have begun publishing speculative-fantastic fictions such as fantasy, gothic, utopian and science fiction. Writing into two literary traditions that are conventionally considered separate -- white speculative genres and black literary-cultural traditions -- the texts integrate an African American sensibility of the past within the present, with speculative fiction's sensibility of the present within the future. Thaler takes stock of this trend by proposing that the growing number of texts has brought forth a genre of its own. She analyzes recent fictions by Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Nalo Hopkinson as in-between color-coded literary and cultural traditions by paying particular attention to concepts of literary history and time as well as postcolonial notions of hybridity and mimicry, race, and identity. The study treads on new ground since it not only offers a broader scope of the various speculative genres in which established and emerging black authors currently publish, but also shows that these fictions contest conventionally accepted notions of white genres and black traditions and, in consequence, of (post-)postmodern literature and popular fiction.

Thaler argues that the recent growth of speculative fictions by black writers has brought forth a genre of its own called Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction. Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for all kinds of fantastic writing, including utopian and science fiction, and in this volume Thaler looks at contemporary novels by female authors of speculative fiction including Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, and Nalo Hopkinson, amongst others.

Spis treści

Acknowledgments Introduction: White Genres, Black Traditions? Anansi, Peter Parker, and Other Tropes 1: The Meaning of the Past? Allegory in Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) 2: Traveling through Time: Vampire Fiction and the Black Atlantic in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) 3: Dystopian Future and Utopian Vision: Surviving Apocalypse in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) 4: A Better Future? Ambiguity, Cyberpunk, and Caribbean Syncretism in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber (2000) Conclusion: The Virtual Subculture of Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction Play It Forward: Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction and Its Futures Notes Bibliography Index

O autorze

Ingrid Thaler is Coordinator at the International Relations and Research Unit, University of Hagen, Germany