Afrosurrealism : The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction 9781138504059, 9781315145778

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: AfroSurrealism: a new black surrealism
AfroSurrealism: a distinct movement and opportunity for social change
Notes
Works cited
1. Mat Johnson’s Pym and Helen Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird: AfroSurrealism, magical realism, and the psychology of reimagining the past
Afrosurrealism as a subset of black modernism
boy snow bird and rethinking primitivism
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
2. Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas, and the AfroSurreal grotesque
Works cited
3. AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
Using visual technologies to understand the past
Avoyage into Afrofuturism: visual technologies and surviving the dystopia
Notes
Works cited
4. The postmodern fables of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine and Summer Brenner’s Oakland Tales
Works cited
5. Horror and immortality in Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer, Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound
Tananarive Due: revisiting and assimilating selves through horror
Hopkinson’s delicious monster(s): exploring indigenous science and the literary homeplace
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ shifting selves and memories
Notes
Works cited
Conclusion: Jeffrey Renard Allen and sustaining the surreal moment
Appendix
Index

Citation preview

“Rochelle Spencer has written an engaging, thoughtful, and intellectual book, AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction. Her introduction provides an overview of a new movement in Surrealism, AfroSurrealism, which she describes along with other speculative fiction movements written by people of color. Further, she shows how these movements differ and offers specific strategies for resisting oppression… With grace, talent, and enthusiasm, Spencer has added a significant piece of work to the scholarship of literature for all.” Ethel Morgan Smith, Hollins University, USA “In what must be considered a superb symphony of genealogy, cultural retrieval, and literary analysis, Rochelle Spencer’s AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction is a very important contribution to the growing literature on ‘the insistent reordering of reality’ that derives from surrealism, and which, specifically as an aspect of Black writing, is a clarion call to both critique and revolution.” Ato Quayson, Stanford University, USA

AfroSurrealism

Examining the surrealist novels of several contemporary writers including Edwidge Danticat, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Junot Díaz, Helen Oyeyemi, and Colson Whitehead, AfroSurrealism, the first book-length exploration of AfroSurreal fiction, argues that we have entered a new and exciting era of the black novel, one that is more invested than ever before in the cross sections of science, technology, history, folklore, and myth. Building on traditional surrealist scholarship and black studies criticism, the author contends that as technology has become ubiquitous, the ways in which writers write has changed; writers are producing more surrealist texts to represent the psychological challenges that have arisen during an era of rapid social and technological transitions. For black writers, this has meant not only a return to Surrealism, but also a complete restructuring in the way that both past and present are conceived, as technology, rather than being a means for demeaning and brutalizing a black labor force, has become an empowering means of sharing information. Presenting analyses of contemporary AfroSurreal fiction, this volume examines the ways in which contemporary writers grapple with the psychology underlying this futuristic technology, presenting a cautiously optimistic view of the future, together with a hope for better understanding of the past. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural, media, and literary studies with interests in the contemporary novel, Surrealism, and black fiction. Rochelle Spencer is co-editor of All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color.

The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture

Dedicated to a renewed engagement with culture, this series fosters critical, contextual analyses and cross-disciplinary examinations of popular culture as a site of cultural politics. It welcomes theoretically grounded and critically engaged accounts of the politics of contemporary popular culture and the popular dimensions of cultural politics. Without being aligned to a specific theoretical or methodological approach, The Cultural Politics of Media and Culture publishes monographs and edited collections that promote dialogues on central subjects, such as representation, identity, power, consumption, citizenship, desire, and difference. Offering approachable and insightful analyses that complicate race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and nation across various sites of production and consumption, including film, television, music, advertising, sport, fashion, food, youth, subcultures, and new media, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture welcomes work that explores the importance of text, context, and subtext as these relate to the ways in which popular cultures work alongside hegemony. Series Editor: C. Richard King Columbia College Chicago, USA Also available in the series: Death in Contemporary Popular Culture Adriana Teodorescu and Michael Hviid Jacobsen AfroSurrealism The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction Rochelle Spencer For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ The-Cultural-Politics-of-Media-and-Popular-Culture/book-series/ASHSER-1395

AfroSurrealism The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction Rochelle Spencer

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Rochelle Spencer The right of Rochelle Spencer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-50405-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14577-8 (ebk) Typeset in Garamond by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Dedicated to My Parents, Ron and Debra Spencer, And Those Who Imagine Change

Contents

1

2 3

4 5

Acknowledgments

x

Introduction: AfroSurrealism: a new black surrealism

1

Mat Johnson’s Pym and Helen Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird: AfroSurrealism, magical realism, and the psychology of reimagining the past

21

Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas, and the AfroSurreal grotesque

49

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

64

The postmodern fables of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine and Summer Brenner’s Oakland Tales

86

Horror and immortality in Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer, Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound

101

Conclusion: Jeffrey Renard Allen and sustaining the surreal moment

122

Appendix Index

125 132

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Annapurna Pictures, Alan Clark, Damon Davis, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Boots Riley and Natasha Stassen, Kara Walker, and Brea Youngblood for very graciously granting permission to include their images in this book. The Water Goddess (2019) appears courtesy Alan Clark, All rights reserved. Woman after Her Last Wound (2013) appears courtesy Rachel Eliza Griffiths, All rights reserved. Still from Sorry To Bother You appears courtesy of Annapurna Pictures, LLC © 2018, All rights reserved. Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014 Polystyrene foam, sugar Approx. 35.5 × 26 × 75.5 feet (10.8 × 7.9 × 23 m) Installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery, A project of Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY, 2014 Photo: Jason Wyche appears with gratitude to Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Photograph by Brea Youngblood of Damon Davis’s The Luminary 38 (2018) appears courtesy Brea Youngblood, all rights reserved. I must thank my family for their encouragement. Their warmth and patience have energized and renewed me. My husband Peter A. McKay, my parents Ron and Debra Spencer, my beautiful sister Kelli J. Spencer, and my in-laws Gabrielle McKay, and Lou Ann and Alvin Whaley, provided much needed love and support. So many people’s labor (listening can be labor) and love made this project possible; they should be thanked. Most especially, Professor Opal Moore, for providing near-constant advice; Professor Brian Morton, who is kind beyond belief and put up with requests for fifteen years (or more!); Dr. Sandra Govan, for reading and offering suggestions; Dr. Trudier Harris, Dr. Susan Bernstein, Dr. Jon Woodson, Professor Jina Ortiz, and the Surreal Women’s Writers group—Manjula Menon and Meg Hayertz—for helping me shape this work and understand the process. Thank you, Neil Jordan and Alice Salt for believing in and supporting this project and answering so many emails. I’m grateful for the ways you worked with me and stayed calm. Thank you, Sasikumar Selvaraj for beautiful edits;

Acknowledgments xi you have an extremely sharp eye—and I appreciate it. A big thank you to my smart, thought-provoking committee: Dr. Veronica Watson, Dr. Mike Sell, Dr. Kenneth Sherwood. Thank you, Drs. David Downing and Lingyang Yang, for providing foundational knowledge. Thank you, Ava DuVernay, Mercedes Yolanda Cooper, Tiffany Briere, and Linda Feng for encouraging and inspiring ideas for this project and the next. Of course I need to thank the busiest collective in the land, the AfroSurreal Writers Workshop—Shannon Holbrook, Audrey T. Williams, Dera R. Williams, Thaddeus Howze, Alan Clark, Desi Linc, Rochelle Robinson, and Amos White—the Kiss My Black Arts Collective and James David Lee. Thanks to my sister Stacia Portee and thanks to these gentle spirits: Dr. Jeffery Renard Allen, Dr. Anand Jayprakash Vaidya, Professor Tayari Jones, Professor Marita Golden, Professor Kathleen Cleaver, Dr. Joanne Gabbin, Dr. Carmen Gillespie, Gaylis Ingram, Pamela McGee, Melanie Myers, Dr. Linda Fraser, Jill McKinney, Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, Dr. Michele Simms Burton, Professor Tananarive Due, Professor Ishmael Reed, Professor Steven Barnes, Lawrence Patrick III, Sabrina Patrick Urrutia, Andre Ashbourne, Dr. Lonny Brooks, Ahmed Best, Terry Bison, Rina Elson Weisman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Dr. Tobias Van Veen and Dr. Stephanie Dunning. Thanks to all members of my family, a family of readers and artists—my Uncles (Mike and Ulysses) and Aunts (Delores, Belinda, Linda, and Kim), cousins, and the Reverend Doctors Lorenzo Carlisle, Earl Ward, and Zandra L. Jordan; the Oakland Public Library (especially the Golden Gate branch and librarians Erin, Inti, CJ, Anna, Naomi, Sharon, Paulette, Gale, Catherine, and Blair; Veda Silva and AAMLO; and the Oakland Library’s Main Branch) and the Orange Park, Florida’s Towne Center Library, the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture, and Robena Bush, a gracious roommate. Thanks to all of the Let’s Play, Digital Literature Garden, and All About Skin writers and artists who influenced and expanded my thinking—you know I will always be grateful to each one of you—but especially Sharan, Kyla, Emily, and Victor (seems I’m asking for something every five minutes! Seriously appreciate the kindness). Thank you, Melissa Faith and Holly Mitchell, for help editing. Thanks to Dr. Maryemma Graham, Dr. Hoyt Long, Sarah Arbuthnot, Arnab Chakraborty, and the Black Book Interactive Project, for providing research tools and financial support; thanks to Professor Serena Simpson and the members of cohort two, Dr. Seretha Williams and Professor Conrad Pegues. This project hopes to create openings for innovative approaches to studies of black speculative fiction. Thanks to all the writers and artists whose imaginations inform this work.

Introduction AfroSurrealism: a new black surrealism

In “Wifredo Lam and the Lost Origins of The Jungle,” Francisco J. Hernández Adrián reminds us that André Breton, the leader of Surrealism, pronounced Afro-Caribbean painter Wifredo Lam, “among all the artists I know,” as “the one who has the most to say” (344). Breton’s declaration should not surprise us. Since its inception, Surrealism has been part of a struggle for freedom and liberation, and part of that struggle has required acknowledging the value of various cultures and their contributions to artistic and literary communities. While Surrealism has been viewed as a primarily European movement, recently scholars have argued, and rightly so, that Surrealism embodied pluralism and the cross-pollination of ideas. In their 2009 landmark study, Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley argue that Surrealism is embedded in social justice and predicated upon African, Indigenous, Asian, and European artists sharing ideas and drawing inspiration from one another. Rosemont and Kelley present compelling evidence of Surrealism as a movement that resists race, gender, and class oppression by liberating the imagination and encouraging anti-authoritative ways of thinking. In their discussion of the specific Surrealisms that have arisen in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and the United States, Rosemont and Kelley suggest the rise of a new black Surrealism, one that is part of Surrealism as “a living practice,” that “will continue to live as long as we dream” (358). Hortense Spillers’ groundbreaking essay “The Idea of Black Culture” raises a possibility I hope to explore in this project: the idea of culture as a resistant force, for understanding struggle and combating some of the psychological violence associated with oppression (7–28). Perhaps AfroSurrealism, as part of Black culture[s], may be a movement for considering ways to live more freely. Surrealism has always offered a critique of those in positions of power and questioned mainstream ways of interpreting the world. Art critic Louise Tythacott’s Surrealism and the Exotic and anthropologist James Clifford’s scholarly articles have investigated Surrealism’s international influences, with Clifford advancing the position that Surrealism’s interest in the ethnic Other allowed modern-day ethnography to come into being (539–564).

2 Introduction Michael Richardson’s introduction to Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean also points to the scope of Surrealism’s reach and demonstrates how, in the years between 1932 and 1946, great intellectuals of color, such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, were all greatly influenced by Surrealism’s anticolonialist and anti-racist stances. Mike Sell continues to view Surrealism as an emancipatory movement and argues in Race, Religion, and War that Surrealism “appealed to African-diasporic activists” in part because the “French Surrealists were public and persistent in their support of anti-colonial, antiEurocentric movements” (75). One could argue that the Surrealists were anticolonial and anti-racist, in part, because they rejected systems of knowledge that privileged Enlightenment rationality and industrial-capitalist logic over intuition and alternate ways of understanding and interacting with the world. This radical departure from the hierarchical divisions of knowledge associated with western metaphysics may have also attracted artists and writers of color to the movement. Literary critic and Howard University Professor Jon Woodson Oragean Modernism identifies “higher consciousness … as the touchstone of African-American writing,” and black people, whom society often positions as divorced from western notions of logic, progress, and modernity (not to be confused with logic, progress, and modernity per se), may have found these tenets of Surrealism particularly compelling. It would be inaccurate to describe black Surrealists as passive participants in a largely European arts movement. For instance, while Brent Hayes Edwards has questioned if Légitime Défense, the 1932 black Surrealist journal, was as radical as other black publications of the era, Edwards notes the “communist-inflected surrealism” of Etienne Léro and “the Légitime Défense group” may have offered a way to resist and rethink assimilation (193–198). Further, Amiri Baraka’s term “AfroSurreal Expressionism,” a descriptor for Black Arts Movement writer Henry Dumas’ surreal and sometimes magical writing, also articulated a form of black aesthetics—the colors, dream imagery, and sounds embedded within the African and African-American imagination. Baraka identifies Dumas’s work as reinforcing the black aesthetic and ideas about revealing “[h]istory and culture” through our feelings and psychological landscapes (165–166). Dumas’s ability to interrogate the interplay of history and psychology was further illuminated by Eugene Redmond, Dumas’s literary executor, who similarly describes the Dumas text—and, by extension, the AfroSurreal text—as revealing “deep and long excursions” into “roots,” “history,” “culture,” and “language” (147). Dumas’s work, as well as the poems of Ted Joans and Jayne Cortez, the plays of Adrienne Kennedy, the music of Sun Ra, and essays from Suzanne and Aimé Césaire celebrate black aesthetics and emphasize how the “insistent reordering of reality” can liberate the imagination and lead to revolutionary and life-changing actions (Kelley 349–358). In “Surrealism and the Creation of a Desirable Future,” the afterword of Black, Brown, and Beige, Kelley writes of a new black Surrealism rooted in the black

Introduction 3 radical intellectual tradition and argues for Baraka’s Afro-Surreal Expressionism as a term “that could apply to any number of thinkers included in this text” (353). Kelley explains Surrealism as “a living practice” and suggests a new black Surrealism in the new millennium rooted in joy and radical, transformative thought (358–359). Afrofuturism, a term created by Mark Dery in the “Black to the Future” essay from Flame Wars, describes “[s]peculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture” (180). Dery’s essay includes an extended discussion of graffiti artist Rammellzee and interviews with science fiction writer Samuel Delany and cultural critics Tricia Rose and Greg Tate. In those interviews, Delany, Tate, and Rose argue for a politically aware, black science fiction tradition. Tate claims, for example, that science fiction’s legacy includes writers Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, and Amos Tutuola; the graffiti artists Rammellzee and Blade; and musicians such as the X Clan and Public Enemy. Rose cites “Sun Ra’s flying saucer imagery” and argues black people not only participate in “technology creativity” but are also on its “cutting edge” (215). Delany’s voice compounds Tate’s and Rose’s arguments about a black science fiction tradition and Afrofuturism as a “oppositional movement” (193). Arguing that black youth culture, in particular, has been banished from a technoculture that remains largely white and wealthy, Delany posits that “a specific miss-use … of the artifacts of technology” and a “complex social critique” (located within the lyrics) inform hip-hop (193). Re-conceptualizing technology, and locating its subversive uses, “Black to the Future” suggests, is part of the Afrofuturism movement and embedded in its writing, visual art, and music. Cultural Studies scholar Alondra Nelson’s scholarship in Afrofuturism and sociology laid the groundwork for black speculative fiction studies. Nelson explains, “Blackness always been constructed as always oppositional to technological chronicles of progress” (1). Published in 2002, at the start of the new millennium, Nelson’s essay “Introduction: Future Texts” both expresses concerns with the ways technology has been understood by mainstream society— as one in which black people contribute few ideas or theories—and resists the notion of a raceless, utopian future (1–4). Instead, Nelson argues for a complex of black people’s relationships with technology: first, Nelson rejects the notion of blacks and people of color as divorced from technology and reminds us of a history of black people writing, creating, and influencing futuristic technologies; second, Nelson questions whether the potency of an idea should be based on socio-economic power. Nelson contends that ideas are sometimes uncredited but that does not negate their potential to transform. In the case of technology, Nelson suggests we should reconsider how society positions those with more money and power as the creators of technologies, even though people of color have generated and spread hypotheses about futuristic technologies. As Sandra

4 Introduction Y. Govan, a leading scholar in Afrofuturism, has said of Samuel R. Delany’s novels, ideas circulate and inform other traditions and philosophies; blackness remains “an insistent presence” (48). Nelson’s research on Afrofuturism remarks on the persistent, if unacknowledged presence of blackness, and situates black intellectual thought at the center of futuristic conversations. These discussions identify blackness as a locus point for challenging conventional modes of thinking and provide the groundwork for Afrofuturism 2.0, which includes AfroSurrealism and other movements. Nelson’s ideas have greatly influenced other scholars and intellectuals. In the nearly twenty years since Nelson and Art McGee developed the Afrofuturism list-serve—which included such artists and intellectuals as Sheree Renée Thomas, Kalí Tal, Paul D. Miller, William Jelani Cobb, Nalo Hopkinson, Ron Eglash, Alexander G. Weheliye, and David Goldberg—Afrofuturism has branched into a 2.0 Movement. Afrofuturism 2.0, Reynaldo Anderson argues, is an “umbrella term,” and synonymous with the modern Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), which includes multiple sub-genres of black speculative fiction. Some of these movements, such as Black Quantum Futurism, which Afrofuturist scholar Rasheedah Phillips explains in Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice, have developed highly specific theories about time and space and are less concerned with the supernatural. Others, such as Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo philosophy, a philosophy which Reed claims “ain’t Negritude,” may include spiritual elements adapted from African religions (28–29). Negritude, Abiola Irele suggests, has a complex history and some of its poetry, such as Aimé Césaire’s Soleil Serpent, may include “surrealist technique” (506). Concerned with the “collective political and cultural oppression of black people,” Negritude is perhaps more intricate than some scholars have suggested; Irele writes about class and regional differences within the black communities and explains that although black peoples experience racism, this oppression may not have been “felt uniformly” (504). The differences in Negritude, which Reynaldo Anderson includes as part of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, includes multiple branches, with different political undertones.1 Apparently, then, differences exist within the BSAM sub-branches, but all work to resist both “white racist normativity and black parochialism” (Anderson). Anderson’s theories provide a basis for understanding black speculative fiction’s aesthetics, which provide complex and specific strategies for understanding, resisting, or challenging oppression. Conceptualizing black aesthetics does not mean adapting essentialist views of blackness—Evie Shockley argues for developing a “more expansive and fluid conception of black aesthetics,” a recognition of the multiple traditions and histories within the black avant-garde (198). (While Shockley’s study focuses on poetry, I hope to investigate how several black speculative fictions offer a critique of power by celebrating freedom—and by violating or questioning the beliefs and values of those in authority.) With more conversations about Afrofuturism 2.0 in film and music, such as Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther film, the term Afrofuturism has exploded in popularity. Yet, in Ytasha L. Womack’s Afrofuturism (171–174), which includes

Introduction 5 discussions with artists Krista Franklin and D. Scot Miller, author of the AfroSurreal Manifesto, AfroSurrealism is described as a present-centered, expanding canon closely intertwined with Afrofuturism (171–173).2 In this discussion, to avoid confusion, I will interrogate Afrofuturism along the lines of Dery’s definition in order to better distinguish how futuristic and presentcentered speculative fictions offer specific methodologies for resisting oppression. Yet Anderson’s terminology offers an important—and useful—way of connecting black speculative texts and examining their similarities. I will use the term “Afrofuturism” when discussing more future-centered “black speculative fiction,” “AfroSurrealism” to examine present-focused black science fiction, and Afrofuturism 2.0 interchangeably with “black speculative fiction” to reveal how these aesthetic and philosophical movements converge. Perhaps one could argue that black aesthetics has always functioned as resistance to dominant cultural norms. What, then, would distinguish AfroSurrealism from other forms of black speculative aesthetics? The black radical tradition has benefited from several generations of black intellectual thought and as these ideas are able to be disseminated more easily, scholars and laypersons are discussing theories of black consciousness (for example, Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and Paget Henry’s Afro-Caribbean Philosophy) through the context of cultural specificity and nationality. These discussions, which explore how, say, Frantz Fanon’s theories identifying the psychoanalytical dynamics underlying racial oppression may be adapted to colonialism in Africa or the Black Power Movement of the United States, require mental flexibility, nuance, and an acknowledgment of the specific and intricate systems underlying, among other issues, the prison industrial complex, strategic violence directed towards black bodies, and poverty in specific black communities. Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins has affirmed that contemporary art from ethnic communities is being asked to perform two roles: “sustain traditional cultural knowledge” and “[address] the community’s tensions” (35). We see these concepts explored in some of the (AfroSurreal) images from acclaimed photograph/poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whose work suggests the role of the artist in sustaining or recovering cultural memories, or in Boots Riley’s landmark film Sorry to Bother You, which positions community as central to the survival of communities of color and the working class. Subcultures exist even within less economically powerful groups or communities, and there may be specific forms of AfroSurrealism within the broader category, but as a whole, AfroSurrealism centers communities of color and is interested in psychology and interpreting how interior memories reflect larger communal concerns. The movement thus wants to investigate and decode these memories. AfroSurrealism is distinct in how it revisits and explores the weird or strange phenomena encountered by black people, forcing a confrontation between memories, present-tense reality, and dreams of the future. The poet and scholar Quincy Troupe has described Henry Dumas’s work as embodying “the magic of an African linguistic past,” and the purest AfroSurrealism spiritually and intellectually time travels (380). AfroSurrealism attempts to reimagine or revisit history and generate a polyphonic conversation intertwining

6 Introduction blacks’ past, present, and future concerns. Due to its specific investigations of these histories, the AfroSurreal narrative resists dominant cultural narratives, but in a manner that varies from magical realism or Animist Realism. One common cultural narrative is that black people are exotic or “magical negroes” (Seitz). In AfroSurrealism, the protagonist often lacks magical powers, and magical events aren’t accepted as truth, as is the case with magical realism. Instead, magic is a confusing and disruptive force, a comment on collective traumas. And though closely linked to Animist Realism and what Africana studies scholar Harry Garuba describes as an attempt to generate a “re-enchantment with the world,” objects located within the AfroSurreal text aren’t tied to spirits or suggestive of entities that induce worship (Garuba). This is perhaps too fine a line, but I argue that Animist Realism relies upon an in-depth understanding of a specific form of African consciousness. Without this knowledge, which has seeped through the Diaspora in less than uniform waves, it becomes difficult to create Animist Realist texts. AfroSurrealism shares Animist Realism’s celebration of black spirituality and the natural world, but acknowledges how slavery forced variations in religion and language and produced realities mediated by racial oppression. This study focuses on how AfroSurrealism explores cultural memories and futuristic dreams as tools of resistance against modern-day racial oppression. And AfroSurrealism produces these effects in distinctly “black” terms, marked by a revolutionary response to cultural trauma. Baraka described Dumas’ writings as having a distinctively black aesthetic—a “black mythological lyricism”—that marked them as inhabiting a space between “resonating dream emotions” and the stories of “real life” (164). While AfroSurrealism shares with French Surrealism an interest in dreams and the psychological, Baraka’s AfroSurrealism differs from the Surrealism developed by André Breton and the French Surrealists (or E. L.T Mesens and the British Surrealists). AfroSurrealism may also differ from the Surrealism produced in other countries in the African Diaspora, such as Egypt and the Surrealism associated with George Henein, founder of the Surrealist group of Cairo, and Joyce Mansour, Albert Cossery, Ramses Younane, and Ikbal El Alailly. Their call to support and “maintain a close contact” with (Egyptian) youth perhaps parallels that made by Alabama-born (or perhaps Saturn-born) Sun Ra (Rosemont and Kelley 152). The AfroSurreal Sun Ra, too, understood the youth’s importance; his film Space is the Place “schools the black youth of inner-city Oakland in the fundamentals of astro-black mythology” (Youngquist 221). Still, whether Surrealism is found in Egypt, Oakland, or France, it remains “diametrically opposed to racist militarization” and has, in the words of editor Nancy Cunard, argued for “an end to the oppression of colored peoples the world over” (qtd. in Rosemont, “Surrealists on Whiteness”). Surrealists Rosemont and Kelley speak of Surrealism as a global movement, and AfroSurrealism is part of this movement, even as it addresses specific concerns. AfroSurrealism examines how American slavery, once termed “the peculiar institution,” is in fact a surreal experience: an entire system of oppression, based on race, a socially constructed phenomenon, continues to

Introduction 7 produce devastating psychological effects within people of African descent. The marvelous, the resistant—and at times joyous—African hybrid cultures resulting from the trauma of the Middle Passage is embedded in AfroSurrealism. Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley define “the marvelous” as, among other things, “the unfettered imagination,” “mad love,” and “a revolution of the mind” (4). AfroSurrealism, which includes versions of the blues, jazz, and hip-hop, demonstrates how a people can develop oppositional and revolutionary ways of thinking and interacting within a larger culture. AfroSurrealism’s critique of the socio-economic conditions associated with race complicates these texts. AfroSurrealism examines conflicts between different classes within black communities and critiques capitalism; however, unlike many other Surrealisms, it does not specifically endorse Marxism. Instead, it may endorse other anti-capitalist philosophies such as black anarchism, or black utopianism, or suggest that Marxism, while helpful, is, to paraphrase Fanon, incomplete. In the groundbreaking text, Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson explains how black Americans were not recruited by the Communist party until 1921 because racial consciousness “was seen by early American Communists as both an ideological backwardness and a potential threat to the integrity of the socialist movement” (220–221). Still, Robinson is not the only prominent intellectual to have observed racial divides within communities that usually championed equity. In “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman,” Claudia Jones, one of the foremost black Communist and intellectual, cites the communist party’s failure to fully address the needs or concerns of black women, even though black women led movements for civil rights and “two out of every five black women” worked at the time of the article’s 1949 publication ( Jones). Richard Wright has been described as “weakened not only by the interpretive constraints of his readership, but by serious restrictions in his own understanding of Marx’s thought” (Karageorgos 111). I argue the concerns voiced by Robinson and Jones, and the supposed “serious restrictions” faced by Wright, stem from the challenge of subsuming Marxism into black political culture or aesthetic practices. The specific peculiarities of American racism have caused black intellectuals and creative practitioners to question, challenge, and resist capitalism without necessarily embracing Marxist theories. This search for an economic philosophy outside of the Marxist/ capitalist binaries is reflected in the AfroSurreal text. AfroSurreal texts critique capitalism, explore the racism embedded within class struggles, and reveal how blacks have created their own theories and strategies, including black anarchy, for gaining economic and social freedom. The texts in this study suggest alternatives to capitalism and provide analyses of the intersections of race and class. Admittedly, one challenge surrounding the study of AfroSurrealism is the possibility that black writers organically invest their texts with oppositional

8 Introduction aesthetics that challenge and disrupt mainstream perspectives. The poet Harryette Mullen recognizes how “language is used differently in mainstream and minority cultures,” (Henning). If black writers, consciously or not, reveal and exploit the tensions and contradictions of a racially oppressive society, then what—other than a reinvestigation of history’s ongoing influence on the present and the future—marks a text as AfroSurreal? Perhaps the answer lies in the knowing and purposeful relationship black writers have developed with the ambiguous and multidimensional literature of the fantastic. For example, since slavery, the African-American autobiography has played a foundational role in black literature, even as the veracity of black writers’ voices was questioned. Narratives by former slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass were framed by “as told by herself” or “written by himself” to remind white audiences that blacks were capable of expressing their own truths. Given this history of authenticating black voices, it seems fitting that speculative fiction, a fiction that exploits and, in some ways, undermines the idea of a shared reality, would appeal to black writers whose perspectives and understandings of the world are continuously called into question by conventional sources of authority. If “the fantastic” is “defined as a special perception of uncanny events,” then the AfroSurreal text may be an especially appropriate venue for investigating the strange and psychologically damaging experiences caused by racial oppression (Todorov 89). Examining both “Afro” and “Surrealism” becomes central to understanding AfroSurrealism. As previously stated, AfroSurrealism analyzes black culture but also embraces Surrealism’s commitment to liberation and anti-racism by exploring moments that hesitate between “the dream,” what some may term the fantastic, and traditional representations of reality. Surrealism, scholar Robin D.G. Kelley argues, “recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought,” and the social justice aspect of AfroSurrealism grows out of the understanding that valuing both logic and intuition, technology and spirituality, is imperative to instigating a global revolution against imperialism (193). As with other Surrealist texts, the AfroSurreal novel presents a strange or absurd moment and suggests a variety of explanations—dreams, druginfluenced hallucinations, supernatural forces, insanity, or something else— for the event. The reader must, in the words of literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov, decide if a narrative’s events are the result of a “deranged imagination” or if they can be “explained rationally” (45). What Todorov refers to as the “fantastic uncanny,” this study will define as “the surreal”; yet because the AfroSurreal text arises out of its unique cultural tradition, with culturally specific ideas about ontology and temporality, I will delineate texts examining the legacies of slavery and racism as “AfroSurreal.” The AfroSurreal text examines weird events, but through the lens of race; a protagonist’s personal and psychological journey becomes a rejection of racism and western ideas about temporality. This study, then, focuses not on the many Surrealists of color who were influenced by the Surrealist movement, but rather on the ways that

Introduction 9 AfroSurrealism raises questions about the consequences of the slave trade— and the subsequent development of hybridized African cultures in faraway lands. Most importantly, the AfroSurreal text offers strategies for resisting racism’s ongoing psychological effects in our present moment. For the goal of examining AfroSurreal’s specific investigation and resistance of racism, I examine AfroSurrealism separately from the Surrealist movement and as its own sub-category, within its own cultural context. Although concerned with black mental health and resiliency, this project does not argue for black communities’ pathology, or suggest that black people are inherently damaged. The contrary: for a people to survive and remain mentally healthy, they must invent methods of resisting oppression. These complex, intricate methods rebel against societal mandates, question oppressive forces, and rewrite trauma, positioning the less powerful as heroic, emotionally strong, and intellectually savvy. Aesthetically, this is no easy achievement: sociologist Ron Eyerman argues that trauma cannot be “easily assimilated into already established frameworks for understanding” (42). Kalí Tal further argues for considering specific oppressions when examining trauma, as “[c]urrent group interests and status will increasingly take precedence over survivor group identification” and “black or brown womanhood” involves experiences of race and class that resists the idea of a “white middleclass womanhood” coded as universal (10–79). If we hope to develop a fuller understanding of trauma, then perhaps it would be helpful to examine how a specific experience, such as racial oppression, complicates how people cope with their traumas, even when racial categories remain in flux. Hortense Spillers reminds us that historically, definitions of blackness have varied; Spillers indicates that while some sociological studies have attempted to create fixed notions of black pathology, black culture and kinship have complicated and fluid legal identities (“Mama’s Baby,” 67). The shifting parameters of blackness reveal more about the psychological states of a nation than black salubrity. I argue, then, that rather than understanding black people’s strategies for investigating, coping, and interpreting trauma as a reflection of black nihilism or Afro-Pessimism, we should consider blackness as a methodology for revealing society’s ruptures and insecurities. AfroSurrealism, like traditional Surrealism, challenges the cultural and economic hegemony of rationality and explores dreams and psychology; however, the concept of race as an arbitrary, surreal phenomenon dominates AfroSurreal texts. The French Surrealists, Tythacott argues, were interested in art outside of Europe, but “African cultures excited them less than those found in Oceania and Australia” (6). Tythacott further suggests the 1929 Surrealist Map of the World, which depicted Africa as one-third its actual size, reflects the Surrealists’ interest in non-African people of color (6). I argue for an AfroSurrealism that reimagines that map by investigating the psychological costs to the African Diaspora, revealing the specific exploitation of black labor, and crosspollinating those realities with multicultural Surrealist ideas. For similar reasons, magical realism, the marvelous real, and Animist Realism, close

10 Introduction cousins to AfroSurrealism, are distinguished from AfroSurrealism. This study suggests contemporary AfroSurreal literature offers new ways of understanding the world as well as generate specific—and creative—strategies for resistance and pleasure. AfroSurrealism: a distinct movement and opportunity for social change In his essay “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: The Third World as Topos for a U.S. Utopia,” Gavin Miller, in what appears to be an overly harsh criticism of African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s work, makes a valid point: the “third world” experience should not be conflated with being “a minority in a rich, first-world country” (212). Miller’s point is well-taken: differences do exist among oppressed peoples. For exactly this reason, it is important to recognize the specific histories, arts, and literatures produced in the wake of trauma. This project aims to avoid eliding significant cultural differences, even while recognizing the often parallel and overlapping horrors of colonialism and slavery. What is the relationship of AfroSurrealism to speculative fiction? While two theories of speculative fiction—Afrofuturism and astrofuturism (De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s theory of a new space age’s potential to launch a less racist and more empathetic world)—align with AfroSurrealism’s concern for black people’s struggle, these theories offer different and specific strategies for fighting racial oppression in fiction. Therefore, Afrofuturism and astrofuturism will be contrasted with AfroSurrealism as theories of speculative fiction that work to dismantle racism, albeit with different methodologies. Particular attention will also be paid to the concept of temporality and the ways that an author’s concerns about the past, present, and the future reveal different strategies for fighting racism. AfroSurrealism is also invested in the grotesque, a mode that connects it with magical realism and which may appear less in Afrofuturism. One important aspect of AfroSurrealism is its emphasis on the grotesque. Magical realism is similarly invested in the grotesque. Still, scholarly criticism on the grotesque and magical realism clarifies AfroSurreal structure in one key way: these types of comparative analyses allow us to recognize how AfroSurrealism’s cultural specificity distinguishes it as its own sub-genre, one with a particular interest in social justice as it pertains to black subjectivities. In other words, AfroSurrealism incorporates elements of the grotesque and is similar to magical realism in that this genre also resists the idea of a world understood completely through reason and logic; however, contemporary AfroSurrealism’s critiques of a specific form of racism—and its purposeful incorporation of ideas from the Black Power and Black Aesthetic Movements— mark it as distinct. Babacar Dieng identifies the Black Power Movement as a “political and intellectual movement that … excavated the African Americans’ past to recover aspects that could help re-define the world in their own

Introduction 11 terms and counter the negative images of non-Western peoples” (123). Dieng’s recognition of the Black Power Movement’s distinctive identity sheds light on how a specific history helps to shape and mold the creative texts generated in the years following the Black Power Movement. And AfroSurrealism’s mingling of a specific past and present—its evocation of temporal bricolage—demonstrates the ways in which AfroSurrealism incorporates grotesque elements, for its own purposes. If one marker of the grotesque is its juxtaposition of disparate elements in an attempt to disrupt the status quo, then AfroSurrealism’s melding of crude and sometimes bawdy humor with beauty and tragedy demonstrates the potency of an AfroSurreal grotesque. As with magical realism, AfroSurrealism allows the grotesque to produce a discordant effect: in the midst of culture ruptures, disharmony, and overwhelming torture, the slavery and the Middle Passage also produced distinctive hybrid cultures, which facilitated the imaginings of multiple forms of resistance. AfroSurrealism and its relationship to—and variations from—magical realism can be attended to through a discussion of acclaimed works of, respectively, AfroSurrealism (Song of Solomon) and magical realism (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel and the recipient of the National Book Critics award, offers a then-contemporary setting (i.e., the story is set in roughly the same time period in which it was written) while referencing specific events in African-American history, including the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist church, the death of Emmett Till, and the Great Migration. While I view Gabriel García Márquez’s work as suggesting the psychological pain associated with racism,3 I also argue that Márquez’s exploration of colonialism produces a different tension than does Toni Morrison’s indictment of racism, colorism, and the legacy of race-based slavery. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez’s most famous work, also depicts events from real life—notably, the Colombian military’s massacre of striking United Fruit Company workers—but his work appears less invested in examining racial politics than Morrison’s. In Latin America, the system of racial classification differs from the United States in that the former is more closely tied to class, while the latter is primarily based on supposed genetic links. Further, while both Márquez and Morrison allow an individual family history to represent the collective history of a nation or a people, in Márquez’s novel, the 17 Aurelianos of various races are murdered because of their political connections and family ties, not their race. Racial politics are suggested in One Hundred Years (Márquez suggests the black prostitute, Nigromanta, who appears towards the end of the novel is poor because she is black), yet racism and black people’s desire for liberation are not part of the novel’s central narrative. Still, despite these significant differences, AfroSurrealism and magical realism are often conflated. Critic Shannon Schroeder describes both Márquez and Morrison as magical realists even while pointing out that “their texts refuse to forget the specific histories of the regions in which they are spawned” (11). If Schroeder is correct that Márquez and Morrison have created specific cultural narratives, located within different

12 Introduction histories, then it seems likely that this specificity manifests itself as two separate genres, or ways of writing non-realistic fiction. Further, I argue that because the novel is a written form, then African-American and AfroCaribbean novels produce a unique psychological tension: given how slaves were legally forbidden to read and write, a black protagonist and references to black folk culture subtly draw attention to ideas about literacy, power, technology, and control. Keeping this idea in mind, it becomes more difficult to view AfroSurrealism as purely magical realism, a genre where this tension rarely exists and, when it does, manifests itself within a different historical, geopolitical, and cultural set of references. Though AfroSurreal texts are rarely included in discussions of the New Wave of science fiction and its associated genres, AfroSurrealism is, in fact, closely related to slipstream, a genre of literature that writers James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have called “literature of cognitive dissonance and of strangeness triumphant” (xi). Bruce Sterling, a writer and champion of slipstream, has investigated slipstream as a product of a modern, technologically changing world. Similar to slipstream texts, AfroSurreal texts share a fascination with psychology and the unconscious and a willingness to integrate humor, irony, science, and myth. AfroSurreal texts also incorporate elements of cinema through language generating verbal “montages,” “jump cuts,” and “dissolves.” AfroSurrealism’s cinema-influenced written narratives are similar to slipstream. But AfroSurrealism’s emphasis on black culture and ongoing oppression separates AfroSurrealism from most slipstream. AfroSurreal texts often examine police brutality, job discrimination, and colorism, topics that seldom appear in slipstream texts. For example, in the article “Slipstream 101,” Pawel Frelik, former president of the Science Fiction Research Association, discusses nine definitions of slipstream, yet none of these definitions specifically reference race or racial oppression. Why should scholars discuss temporality in black speculative fiction and delineate AfroSurrealism from similar forms such as Afrofuturism, magical realism, or slipstream? What is at stake when we fail to examine these sub-genres’ individual characteristics? These genres offer distinct but equally valid ways of understanding the world; analyzing these various movements’ differences and similarities allows for more nuanced conversations about oppressed people’s relationships with power, labor, and technology. Through its dystopian landscapes, Afrofuturism becomes a sub-genre for interpreting and recognizing technology’s potential to oppress. Afrofuturism revisits how technology—from the Tuskegee experiment and the cells of Henrietta Lacks to the cotton gin and the forced sterilization of black women—has inflicted pain and trauma on the black body in the name of reason and progress. The Afrofuturist text both warns us of the future’s potential to replicate historical hierarchies and explores black people’s ability to develop their own futuristic technologies to fight domination. Afrofuturism may involve futuristic or fantastic technologies. AfroSurrealism, in contrast, celebrates real-world technologies (cell phones, radios, social media, film) as tools of resistance.

Introduction 13 Of course, AfroSurrealism’s intermingling of real-world, contemporary technologies, actual historical events, and fictional characters (in contrast with soul punk or steam funk, which reimagines or revisits alternate histories) could prove problematic to its project—storytelling that challenges and opposes existing oppressions. AfroSurreal scholar Terri Francis cautions that “imagination and narrative” can threaten “the factual accuracy on which an ethical, rational, and compassionate histiography relies” (45). Both AfroSurrealism and steamfunk or soul punk, black-centered forms of steampunk, rely on historical narratives to comment upon present-day lives. The AfroSurreal text blends real-world elements, from contemporary technologies and environments, with historical allusions and imaginary characters, while the steamfunk or soulpunk text explores alternative histories and realities, often with reimagined technologies; both texts present a challenge to conventional thinking. Further, if creators remain mindful of Francis’s warning, AfroSurreal and steam funk and soul punk texts can free readers to reconsider how race, gender, and class influence how we tell and shape history. While AfroSurreal and steam funk may incorporate technology differently from Afrofuturism 1.0, these texts often incorporate technology and its possibilities for documenting counternarratives and countering racist and psychologically damaging myths. In a 2010 technology conference, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that, every two days, people “create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003” (qtd. in Siegler). This fact, along with Moore’s Law (Gordon E. Moore’s well-documented prediction that, as the number of transistors in a circuit doubles every two years, technology grows exponentially smaller and more powerful), forces today’s AfroSurreal writers to probe more deeply into technology’s effects on the human psyche. Contemporary AfroSurreal writers explore technology within their work and have incorporated technology into producing and selling AfroSurreal texts. These newer AfroSurreal texts risk critical neglect at precisely the time when the Internet has allowed them to proliferate. For these reasons, the texts included in this study are relatively recent, all published after 2009. However, black speculative fiction is diverse and flourishing, and older AfroSurreal fictional texts, as well as Afrofuturist and AfroSurreal music, art, poetry, and creative nonfiction require more study and exploration. Though this project is necessarily limited—there will be many omissions and many writers neglected, as it is not possible to analyze all of the AfroSurreal texts and still provide close, meaningful readings of individual authors’ work—this remains an attempt to explore the connections between different contemporary writers and provide historical context for their work and a sense of a shared, resistant aesthetic. Afrofuturism scholar Sheree R. Thomas expresses reluctance at making any pronouncements or “grand sweeping statements” about AfroSurreal fiction. Thomas offers valid and useful criticism; scholars should avoid generalizations, especially as black speculative texts draw on diverse philosophical and intellectual traditions. This study attempts to

14 Introduction honor Thomas’ guidance, as it explores the strategies particular modes of black science fiction employ for resisting race and class oppression. Black speculative fiction or the Afrofuturism 2.0 text has proliferated as a result of online publishing. It seems as though contemporary scholarly criticism cannot keep pace with the outpouring of creative work and layman intellectual conversations. This project hopes to sort, organize, and provide scholarly analysis of a particular segment of this work. In addition, I hope this project will outline how some of these more recent texts are engaging with newer ideas about literacy and digital technologies, revisiting the Surrealists’ ideas about liberation and psychology, and making original statements about how these ideas affect our understanding of racism’s effects on the human psyche. Chapter 1, “Mat Johnson’s Pym and Helen Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird: AfroSurrealism, magical realism, and the psychology of reimagining the past,” discusses the reconstruction of a literary past. Oyeyemi reimagines the fairy tale, while Johnson revisits Edgar Allan Poe. The psychological criticism of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, and Jacqueline de Weever factor in, as this chapter examines AfroSurrealism and the psychology of subverting familiar myths and tales. Harry Garuba and Ato Quayson help to distinguish Animist Realism from AfroSurrealism, while literary critics Wendy Faris and Maggie Ann Bowers, who offer specific definition of magical realism and magical realist worldviews, provide further evidence that Oyeyemi and Johnson have created texts that delve into AfroSurrealism rather than magical realism. Oyeyemi and Johnson’s AfroSurreal novels investigate ideas about the psychology of racial trauma, temporality, and the primitive by juxtaposing western tales with black Diasporian language; these novels demonstrate how racial trauma becomes the catalyst for their protagonists’ neurosis and personal growth. Johnson and Oyeyemi’s novels retell the tragic mulatto story found in realistic black literature; however, Johnson and Oyeyemi juxtapose the tragic mulatto trope with surrealist imagery in order to explore one key question: what do our representations of race reveal about society’s biggest anxieties? Lacan’s and Kristeva’s theories, which examine how we are visually attracted to images that repel us, will be key to understanding how Oyeyemi’s and Johnson’s surreal landscapes represent America’s schizophrenic views of race. In addition, de Weever’s analysis of black women’s use of mythology establishes a foundation for examining how Oyeyemi and Johnson synthesize African and European myths. Finally, Marie-Louise von Franz’s work on the fairy tale offers an additional means of understanding Oyeyemi’s text. By juxtaposing various Eurocentric and Afrocentric fairytales and their depictions of feminine beauty, Oyeyemi questions the persistence of a European aesthetic at the expense of an African one—and reinforces an AfroSurreal perspective that resists one culture’s domination over another’s. Chapter 1 situates Oyeyemi’s and Johnson’s novels as part of a natural outgrowth of AfroSurrealism’s interest in psychology and the unconscious. Bowers explains that Surrealism is “most distinct from magical realism

Introduction 15 since the aspects that it explores are associated not with material reality but with the imagination and the mind” (22). Robin D.G. Kelley appears to agree with Bowers, as Kelley describes Surrealism’s commitment to the “imagination” as the movement’s “most powerful weapon” (159). Oyeyemi and Johnson’s explicit discussion of psychology offers one way of distinguishing AfroSurrealism from magical realism. Still, AfroSurrealism’s examination of race offers yet another. Racism, as W.E.B. DuBois has noted in The Souls of Black Folks, is itself a surreal and psychologically devastating experience (our responses to individuals’ public identities are mediated by a social construction), and many texts by writers of color contain surrealist elements. But unlike other genres, such as realism (the protest novel, the autobiography) or naturalism, that have been adopted by the black literary canon, the AfroSurreal text references phenomena—ghosts, spirits, monsters, time travel—not found in conventional reality. At the same time, the AfroSurreal text differs from magical realism in that the latter assumes “something extraordinary really has happened” (Bowers 22). AfroSurrealism, in contrast, makes no such assumption and offers a possible explanation, often psychological, for strange or supernatural phenomenon. Oyeyemi’s and Johnson’s novels thus reveal AfroSurreal fiction as a branch of black speculative fiction particularly interested in how the mind works. Chapter 2, “Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas, and the AfroSurreal grotesque,” examines AfroSurrealism’s social justice component through its use of the grotesque. The writings of Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley will illuminate how Danticat’s and Abani’s novels embody characteristics of Surrealism and AfroSurrealism in order to resist dominant cultural narratives about oppression. At the same time, Danticat and Abani allow the grotesque to direct their readers’ attention to ideas about the horrors of poverty and racial oppression. Wolfgang Kayser’s scholarship on the monstrous helps us understand how Danticat and Abani examine the grotesque through a juxtaposition of incongruent images. Danticat’s and Abani’s AfroSurreal novels showcase geographical landscapes that are vast, terrifying, and symbolic of the racial oppression their characters face. But as Danticat and Abani apply these ideas about the grotesque to oppression, their texts reveal the complexity of their characters’ lives and how the painful and the beautiful, the good and the evil, are often intertwined. Their novels, which showcase people falling in love with strange, exotic “monsters” and modern technology that both abuses and empowers people, raise the following questions: why are people who exist outside of mainstream ideas about respectability, beauty, or intelligence represented as monstrous? If monsters epitomize all that is repulsive, then why are people so often sexually attracted to the cultural Other? Finally, do contemporary technologies reinforce society’s ideas about who should be exalted and who should be denigrated or considered a monster? Danticat’s and Abani’s work melds the grotesque to AfroSurrealism’s resistance to onedimensional depictions of poor or working-class blacks.

16 Introduction Chapter 3, “AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One,” clarifies how AfroSurrealism differs from Afrofuturism by placing, as Todorov does, two highly similar genres in conversation with each other. Reynaldo Anderson’s work on Afrofuturism provides an entry into discussing its more recent conceptualizations. This chapter highlights both how AfroSurrealism and Afrofuturism offer varied responses to racial oppression and how Díaz’s and Whitehead’s novels serve as exemplars of those responses. Afrofuturism is perhaps the more familiar of the two movements, and because Afrofuturism is both a popular movement and one associated with technology and the future, few scholars have focused on the ways AfroSurreal texts also incorporate technology. Chapter 3 provides a foundation for distinguishing AfroSurreal texts’ incorporation of technology from that of the futuristic text. Furthermore, I will argue that both The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Zone One reproduce cinematic technologies (the jump cut, the montage) within written texts; however, they do so for entirely different reasons. To be more specific, this chapter demonstrates how both Díaz and Whitehead infuse their novels with cinematic language in order to emphasize oppression’s psychological effects on the black protagonist. In essence, Díaz’s AfroSurreal novel parallels the lives of his present-day AfroCaribbean characters with those of their ancestors to show slavery’s legacy, while Whitehead’s Afrofuturistic novel demonstrates the results continued class and racial inequality could have upon the future. In AfroSurrealism, novels incorporate cinematic concepts in order to examine history’s influence over present-day landscapes. Afrofuturism, on the other hand, is more concerned with the future, with technology’s potentially isolating effects, and numerous film references emphasize not only the reader’s disconnect from the novel’s protagonist, but also the protagonist’s disconnect from himself. Chapter 3 compares how AfroSurrealism and Afrofuturism incorporate cinematic storytelling techniques to tell strange or speculative stories about people of African descent, but for different reasons. The Afrofuturist text purposefully revisits racist cinematic images from a new perspective (that of the person of color). The future, the Afrofuturist argues, is one in which people of color have a voice and some degree of control over how their images are presented—even if they lack agency over other aspects of the future. AfroSurreal texts also examine how people of color interact with visual technologies (cinema and computerized images); however, their investment in history is greater, and they are less interested in the future than in allowing contemporary technology to retell and reexamine history. This chapter, then, focuses on how Afrofuturist and AfroSurreal texts produce different results, even when their authors infuse them with similar cinematic storytelling conventions. Chapter 4, “The postmodern fables of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine and Summer Brenner’s Oakland Tales,” examines the qualities AfroSurrealism shares with the postmodern fiction known as slipstream—and mentions a few key

Introduction 17 differences. As with slipstream, these texts by Brenner and LaValle include many of the same attributes: irreverence, humor, and an interest in science, philosophy, and technology. The work of Grace Dillon, who defines Native slipstream as “a species of speculative fiction” that may explore “time travel, alternative realities and multiverses, and alternative histories,” provides a foundation for considering AfroSurrealism as a movement sharing characteristics with other slipstreams, even as it maintains its own identity and history (3). James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, and Bruce Sterling have identified key characteristics of slipstream, and their theories are examined here. Finally, this chapter incorporates a short but meaningful discussion of how black protagonists and AfroSurreal themes, rather than the writer’s identity, mark a text as AfroSurreal. This chapter makes the rather controversial argument for cultural memory and knowledge as defining and supporting a definition of blackness even as modern technologies (artificial and virtual realities) may de-emphasize physical signifiers of blackness (e.g., skin color, hair texture). In other words, I compare LaValle’s and Brenner’s texts with other slipstream such as they delve, significantly, into the role of culture in sustaining black resiliency. Through multiple intertextual allusions to African-American novels, histories, and songs, LaValle and Brenner weave AfroSurreal themes into their work; at the same time, these multiple textual allusions produce an uncanny effect similar to slipstream. Still, while these texts include strange, uncanny events, they also occur within specific real-world locations and occurrences, which distinguish these texts from pure fantasy. In Chapter 5, “Horror and immortality in Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer, Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound,” as with other AfroSurreal texts, these tales are structured to provide moments of hesitation between the fantastic and the real world, and readers can never be sure when they have entered one or left another. This, I argue, can produce a splintered self, in an uncertain relationship with reality and the imagination. Due, Hopkinson, and Griffiths provide an investigation of collective and individual memory as generative and capable of producing a holistic self, or as destructive and an apparatus for making unresolved antinomies more apparent. Through the compressed forms of the short story, novella, and photograph (as opposed to the extended forums of the novel or the film), Due, Hopkinson, and Griffiths employ AfroSurreal or Indigenous Science Fiction storytelling methods to offer compelling investigations of memory. This essay thus explores Due’s, Hopkinson’s, and Griffiths’ ideas of the self, time, and trauma and includes scholarship from Robin R. Means Coleman, Sigmund Freud, Kinitra Brooks, and Grace Dillon to demonstrate the unresolved tensions in AfroSurreal horror and how these authors make arguments about the way that history remains deeply embedded in our present-day imaginations. This chapter reinforces the complexity of the AfroSurreal text: it is not an entirely realistic, though it includes real-world attributes; it is not entirely fantastic, though it examines the imaginary; it is not futuristic, though it is

18 Introduction invested in modern technology; and it may or may not explicitly reference race, in terms of skin color or physical features, though it always contains references to black culture and mythology. This project has a twofold purpose. First, it explores how one subset of black speculative fiction, AfroSurrealism, infuses a familiar, contemporary world with the marvelous in order to demonstrate how race is itself a strange and bizarre phenomenon. Second, it argues that AfroSurreal fiction offers strategies for resistance and spiritual renewal. The AfroSurreal text moves away from the paradigm of miserabilism, even while acknowledging the significance of racial oppression. AfroSurreal texts demonstrate how folklore, modern technology, and psychology facilitate communication, as history is preserved through myth, transmitted through technology, and understood through self-awareness. Therefore, AfroSurrealism often focuses on the storytelling process and the mise en abyme, the story within the story, to reveal how narratives help people cope with the pain of daily life. Stories, the AfroSurreal novel suggest, serve as sources of resilience, as a means of surviving and resisting a racially oppressive society. And, ultimately, this unique form of resilience, this desire to enter imaginary or interior spaces to survive and resist racial trauma, leads to new storytelling strategies and to the marvelous. Notes 1 For further articulation on the various forms of Negritude, see Jean Bapiste Popeau’s Dialogues of Negritude or Reiland Rabaka’s Negritude Movement: W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea. For a discussion on the poetry of Negritude and its influence on the African novel, see F. Abiole Irele’s Cambridge Companion to the African Novel and Lydie Moudileno’s essay “The Francophone Novels in Sub-Saharan Africa.” 2 Although Garuba suggests that Animism “does not name any specific religion” and is an “umbrella designation for a mode of religious consciousness,” I have opted to capitalize the term, except in direct quotations, as the names of the Yoruba Orishas (spirits) are traditionally capitalized. 3 Both Márquez’s and Morrison’s texts suggest the ways that race and class intersect, yet Morrison seems more interested in racism’s psychological violence.

Works cited Abiola, Irele Francis. “Negritude-Literature and Ideology.” The Journal of Modern African Studies. Vol. 3, No. 4, 1965, pp. 499–526. Anderson, Reynaldo. “Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Art Movement: Notes on a Manifesto.” How We Get to Next. Medium. https://howwegettonext.com/afrofuturism2-0-and-the-blackspeculative-art-movement-notes-on-a-manifesto-f4e2ae6b3b4d/. Baraka, Amiri. “Henry Dumas: Af. Mediumro-Surreal Expressionist.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 22, No. 2, 1988, pp. 164–166. Bowers, Maggie Ann. Magic(al) Realism. Routledge, 2004. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 23, No. 4, October 1981, pp. 539–564.

Introduction 19 Dery, Mark, editor. “Black to the Future.” Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Duke University Press, 1994. Dieng, Babacar. “Reclamation in Walker’s Jubilee: The Context of Development of the Historical Novel.” The Journal of Pan African Studies. Vol. 2, No. 4, 2008, pp. 117–127. Dillon, Grace L. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora. Harvard University Press, 2003. Eyerman, Ron. “Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration.” The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology. edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith. 2012. Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.” Public Culture. Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003, pp. 261–285. muse.jhu. edu/article/42967. Govan, Sandra Y. “The Insistent Presence of Black Folk in the Novels of Samuel R. Delany.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 18, No. 2, 1984, pp. 43–48. Henning, Barbara. “A Conversation with Harryette Mullen: From A to B.” www.naropa.edu/ academics/jks/publications/notenoughnight/spring-10/conversation-with-harryette-mullen.php. Hernández Adrián, Francisco-J. “Paris, Cuba, New York: Wifredo Lam and the Lost Origins of The Jungle.” Cultural Dynamics. Vol. 21, No. 3, November 2009, pp. 339–360. Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman.” Political Affairs. 1941. www.aaihs.org/claudia-jones-feminist-vision-of-emancipation/. Karageorgos, Konstantina M. “Deep Marxism: Richard Wright’s The Outsider and the Making of a Postwar Aesthetic.” Mediations: A Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. 2015. Mediations. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/deep-marxism. Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon, 2003. Kelly, Patrick James and John Kessel. Feeling Very Strange. Tachyon, 2006. Kilgore, De Witt. Astrofuturism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Márquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper, 1967. Miller, Gavin. “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: The Third World as Topos for a U.S. Utopia.” Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film, edited by Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal. McFarland & Co, 2010, pp. 202–212. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. Random House, 2004. Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Texts.” Social Text. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2002, pp. 1–15. Phillips, Rasheedah. Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice. Vol. 1. The Afrofuturist Affair, 2015. Redmond, Eugene. “Introduction: The Ancient and Recent Voices within Henry Dumas.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 22, No. 2, Henry Dumas Issue, Summer 1988, pp. 143–154. Reed, Ishmael. New and Collected Poems, 1964–2007. Avalon, 2007. Richardson, Michael. Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism in the Caribbean. Trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. Verso, 1996. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina, 2000. Rosemont, Franklin. “Surrealists on Whiteness: From 1925 to the Present.” Race Traitor. Vol. 9, Summer 1998, pp. 5–18. https://archive.org/details/race_traitor_9/page/n1. Rosemont, Franklin and Robin D.G. Kelley. Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. University of Texas, 2009. Schroeder, Shannon. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas. Greenwood Publishing, 2004. Sell, Mike. The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War. Seagull, 2012. Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2011.

20 Introduction Siegler, M.G. “Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create as Much Information as We Did Up to 2003.” AOL Inc. https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics. Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 64–81. Spillers, Hortense. “The Idea of Black Culture.” The New Centennial Review. Vol. 6, No. 3, Winter 2006, pp. 7–28. Thomas, Sheree Renée. Personal Interview. 26 November 2014. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cornell University Press, 1975. Troupe, Quincy. “For the Griot from Sweet Home, Henry Dumas: A Tribute to His Genius.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 22, No. 2, Henry Dumas Issue, Summer 1988, pp. 379–383. Tythacott, Louise. Surrealism and the Exotic. Routledge, 2003. Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013. Woodson, Jon. Oragean Modernism. Self-published, 2013. Youngquist, Paul. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism. University of Texas Press, 2016.

1

Mat Johnson’s Pym and Helen Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird AfroSurrealism, magical realism, and the psychology of reimagining the past

Is AfroSurrealism an offspring of Surrealism and the avant-garde? Or do its roots lie elsewhere, balanced within a magical realist, third-world philosophy that challenges dominant Western views? Should these distinctions matter? Paul Gilroy takes issue with the concept of both a black aesthetic situated inside a “hermetically enclosed culture” and a modernist black aesthetic rooted within a pluralistic and fluid definition of race that downplays the realities of racial oppression (32). AfroSurrealism, I argue, meets Gilroy’s challenge of locating the “doggedly evasive essence of black artistic and political sensibility” while also acknowledging the hybridity of black culture. AfroSurrealism explores the dialectic between the “ontological essentialist” black aesthetics associated with the Black Arts Movement and those of Trey Ellis’s modernist New Black Aesthetic. Larry Neal posits that the black aesthetics movement should reject “protest literature”—art aimed towards white audiences that protests blacks’ social conditions—and instead, must be appraised within the context of black nation building. In contrast, Ellis’s “cultural mulatto” celebrates black culture while advancing what some black artists describe as a lesser commitment to political action (233–243). Among its several disruptive strategies, AfroSurreal texts connect political action to black hybridity and function as cultural rhizomes investigating how the multiplicity and diversity of the black experience could offer strategies for resisting racial domination. As I explained in the Introduction, AfroSurrealism is related to Surrealism and the avant-garde, but it would be inaccurate to describe AfroSurrealism as simply an offshoot of Surrealism. AfroSurrealism acknowledges slavery’s legacy in African-Americans’ physical and psychological dislocation, and also recognizes the term “Surrealism”—divorced from the prefix “Afro”—as inadequate to fully describe black subjectivity, as black texts resist the “uncomfortable legacy of avant-garde primitivism” (Edmondson 42). In fact, black people may not see ourselves as primitive or Other at all. What happens when ontology, the creative process, and empathy are understood and explained by the Other? What occurs when the subject belongs to the culture or nation being examined? In AfroSurreal texts, what

22 AfroSurreal and magical real do contemporary black protagonists reveal about the African Diaspora or the legacies of slavery and the Middle Passage? The AfroSurrealism of Mat Johnson’s Pym and Helen Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird perform a significant function: through language, they dramatize the psychological tensions of the black protagonist’s clash with Western notions of modernity and logic. Johnson follows protagonist Chris Jaynes through his journey into fantastical sites in the Antarctic, and boy snow bird examines the science behind optical illusions, as Oyeyemi explores a family’s mixed-race connections. (In this discussion, in keeping with a fluid conception of blackness, the ethnicity of mixed-race protagonists of African ancestry is alternatively described as “black” and “mixed race.”) Still, it is overly simplistic to argue that all black artists, by simply being black, will reflexively produce revolutionary texts that do not simply reinscribe western values. Black people interact with mainstream culture and are often influenced by hegemonic cultural ideas. In “The Idea of Black Culture,” Hortense Spillers convincingly argues of one possible future—an assimilated black culture drained of its particularities, and consequently, its resistance. Spillers also describes Kant and Hegel as black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois’s influences and argues, with certainty, that “Du Bois executed a Marxist critique” (17). Spillers’ argument proves the difficulty of separating currents of black intellectual thought from western academic discourse. Black intellectuals are often in conversation with intellectuals of myriad traditions; through language alluding to “intellectual technologies” and “corporate media,” Spillers suggests a possible future where black capitalism and social mobility dilute black culture of its critical force (26). How can black culture, especially in media spaces that deemphasize physical blackness and the black body, demonstrate an intellectual resistance or function as “a counterstatement to American culture/civilization, or Western culture/civilization” (25)? But that has yet to happen. Spillers argues, and I agree, that black culture, as “one of the last bastions of critique,” hasn’t yet “[fallen] away” (26). Jennifer A. González acknowledges “the enactment of racial identity in online sites takes a variety of forms” and the ways coded—and not so coded—messages about race, ethnicity, and culture can infiltrate present-day, online spaces (29). González examines race and technology in the context of avatars and online passing,1 and recent research suggests user patterns can also be racially coded: the Pew Research Center reveals social media patterns vary with race and ethnicity (Krogstad). People can form racial identities in online/technological space and racial signifiers can be transmitted through text, language, and music. Further, blackness has not been subsumed into the mainstream political processes and institutions. Even with the ascendancy of a black United States president, black people remain, often violently, separated from—and unincorporated into—white mainstream institutions. Historian William Jelani Cobb’s 2010 study The Substance of Hope reminds us that “[as] a black

AfroSurreal and magical real 23 man planned to assume the most powerful office in the world [Barack Obama’s inauguration] … three black men were shot by police, two of them fatally; two of them unarmed” (158). Cobb reminds us of a particular form of violence that positions black people on society’s margins, creates an oppositional tension towards mainstream authorities, and yet, forces new, oppositional worldviews and definitions of selfhood. If we accept the premise that temporality is part of one’s subjectivity, then to ignore people’s conceptions of time is to deny their humanity. Western philosophers have created persuasive arguments about economics, aesthetics, and psychology but these arguments are subtly biased towards a linear, western conception of time. Karl Marx brilliantly incorporates history into economic theory that moves linearly from (European) feudalism to capitalism. Richard Wolin suggests most western philosophers took linear temporality for granted, and even though German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued for time as a fundamental aspect of the human or Daesin’s existence, Heidegger, a Nazi sympathizer, believed Jewish and black peoples stood outside of history2 (76). Because in West Africa there has been an oral storytelling culture and in the Americas black people were forbidden to read and write, black people have often been deemed by text-oriented thinkers as departures from history, which western philosophers have defined as written. Linear temporality subtly influences much of western thought, and my argument centers not so much on the author’s ethnicity but on the black protagonist and the reader’s psychological processes. As the reader empathizes with a black protagonist who confronts racial oppression suggested through strange or surreal moments, the reader discovers—or rediscovers—new ways of understanding time.3 The black protagonists of Pym and boy snow bird provide an alternative understanding of temporality, which subsequently challenges Western theories on topics as varied as progress, economics, intelligence, and beauty. While the history of Surrealism and AfroSurrealism intersect, AfroSurrealism operates within a different understanding of history and temporality and examines black protagonists whose agency and freedom are reflected in society’s treatment of raced subjects. Jennifer L. Griffiths writes of the specific traumas visited upon the black female body and argues for “a cultural memory of violence” (65). Kodwo Eshun has claimed the Middle Passage and its corresponding alienation generate art that attempts to make meaning from trauma (289–292). Griffiths’ and Eshun’s theories suggest not only discursive groups’ use of art as a way to reconcile trauma and generate meaning, but also how varied cultural experiences may cause aesthetics and worldviews to diverge. We can recognize the value of cultural pollination, hybridization, and creolization while still admitting the asymmetrical influence particular philosophies and experiences may exert over distinct groups of people. Speaking to these various histories, AfroSurrealism attempts to develop a language for the DuBoisian psychological struggle, the process Claudia Tate has described as black people’s “Manichean conflict between their public performance of an essentialized, homogenous blackness” and

24 AfroSurreal and magical real a “private performance of individual personality” (6). The AfroSurreal text provides this language through ambiguous images and events that affirm the marvelous and the imagination, while providing a trenchant critique of capitalism and rationalism. Pym and boy snow bird produce alternative understandings of temporality by revisiting narratives from the Western canon and infusing these stories with African-American histories, folklore, and cultural references in scenes that disrupt the western tale’s diegesis and distort linear time. Eshun’s work on Afrofuturism suggests how knowledge is tied to culturally distinctive understandings of time. Countermemory, the term Eshun uses to describe the process in which “black intellectuals explored memories that questioned the concept of primitivism by positioning slavery as the basis of modernity,” is part of a black tradition that “defined itself as an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten” (288). Johnson and Oyeyemi rely on countermemory, which is a key feature of the AfroSurreal text. While Eshun argues that Afrofuturism also explores countermemory, “Afrofuturism’s first priority is to recognize that Africa increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection” (288). However, as I’ve argued, futurist investigation is not AfroSurrealism’s first priority. Thus, I position countermemory and its strategic employment in resisting present-day oppression and producing psychological resiliency as AfroSurrealism’s primary concern. The way we think about time structures our politics and the ways we imagine race and class; a text’s subtle disruptions of time shifts the narrative. Eshun argues that Afrofuturism intervenes to create a chronopolitics that imagines alternative futures predicated on the rejection of the primitive (297). Because alternative futures have yet to be experienced, the Afrofuturist narrative is less concerned with the uncanny, the process by which the familiar becomes strange, and more invested in demonstrating that blackness should not be situated in the past, but imaginatively in the present. In contrast, the AfroSurreal text incorporates histories and mythologies to exaggerate the strange, uncanny effect of our present-day oppressions. Eugene Redmond has said of Henry Dumas’s AfroSurreal fiction that it “may appear to be ‘new’ in the literary sense of that term” but is “ancient in origins, archetypes, meanings, and structures” (150). Other AfroSurreal texts wield storytelling strategies with archetypal figures and narratives, in that they revisit African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-American folklore, and reinterpret texts from European traditions, which alters the way we read the hypotext. Afrosurrealism as a subset of black modernism Black intellectuals such as Toni Morrison and Kodwo Eshun suggest that texts authored by black writers do not fit neatly into modernism or the avant-garde, as these terms have been defined by critic Peter Bürger, whose influential work Theory of the Avant-Garde examines the avant-garde’s failure

AfroSurreal and magical real 25 to integrate itself with life (22–51). Yet, if Bürger argues that institutionalized art can still offer individual catharsis and “stabilize the subject” (95), what concerns should we have if the subject itself is at odds with society? Historically, Njoroge Njoroge reminds us that the “[m]usic, dance and aesthetic production” of black slaves were distinctive and “often masked potential subversion” (20). I argue that blackness continues to subvert, challenge, and function as a counter-force to mainstream societal institutions (e.g., police, school) as long as racism exists. Several black writers, notes Veronica Watson, have written about white people and developed an “oppositional black gaze”4 that questions white supremacy and its hypocrisy (141). In AfroSurreal fiction, strange events reveal the absurdities of white society and the challenges facing the black protagonist. And, if we consider Bürger’s ideas about the role art can play in individual catharsis at face value, if we embrace the concept of art as a source of emotional resilience for the individual subject, at least, then could a black subject, at odds with mainstream culture, transform society while undergoing a creative and cathartic release? AfroSurrealism is related to the Surrealist and avant-garde traditions; however, the black subject infuses AfroSurreal texts with unique oppositional tensions. In the introduction to The Avant-Garde: Race Religion War, Mike Sell argues that both the artists associated with “Fluxus and Happenings and the activists-intellectuals and artists of the Black Arts Movement” can be viewed as minorities “challenging political power” (7). In a way, they are. Yet, as Surrealist scholars Dawn Ades and Michael Richardson point out, “Surrealism … emerged as the negation of the Dadaist negation” and examined the “crisis of consciousness of western thought” (8). So, as with other avant-garde movements, AfroSurrealism explores the “crisis of consciousness of western thought” but with an additional focus: the AfroSurreal text purposefully incorporates West African philosophies about temporality, science, and truth. These African traditions may not be as apparent with other avant-garde movements. Post-World War I Surrealists, for example, rejected colonialism and celebrated the Other, but relied on a conception of linear temporality. The “modern man,” Antonin Artaud, the theorist connected with theater and the avant-garde, writes, “acts like a beast or like the terrified individual of primitive times” (qtd. in Ades and Richardson 264). Similarly, the writer Jacques Viot describes the people of New Guinea as estranged from the present: “We spend our time trying to link primitivism with civilisation. We will not succeed” (qtd. in Ades and Richardson 112). These ideas about ruptured “progress” and “civilization” may be questioned by many writers of black speculative fiction, and the AfroSurreal text, in particular, highlights the absurdity of linear conceptualizations of “progress,” “culture,” and “society.” Splintered, metamodernist culture offers a persuasive claim against my argument for resistant, oppositional AfroSurreal texts. One could argue that contemporary culture produces decentralized, authoritarian institutions and

26 AfroSurreal and magical real renders black artists less a rebellious tsunami than a current in a quickly shifting wave. If we live in an environment where, as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge remind us, “[I]nstitutions of art and literature … have long since been recontextualized by other media of expression, representation, and reception,” then how do we create spaces of resistance? This argument complicates theories put forth by Mike Sell in The Avant-Garde: Race Religion War and by David Bate in Photography and Surrealism which suggest the avant-garde is in itself already a minority, although these minority groups may possess varying degrees of power. Minority artists possessing a minority perspective within an already divided and fragmented culture would seem to hold little power. Still, I argue that these divided subgroups may produce more challenging or subversive art precisely because they are located outside of more dominant, mainstream cultures. Bürger argues that the avant-garde failed in its mission to integrate art back into social life. Yet what can we make of art that has almost always existed apart from institutions, such as galleries, museums, and large foundations? The art Bürger discusses is typically a “European and bourgeois phenomenon” (Schulte-Sasse xi). Yet not only has black art been separate from institutions, it has always maintained its pragmatic role in black life and has never fully adopted the principle of “art for art’s sake.”5 Terry Thomas writes of the work of Afri-COBRA, the Black Arts Movement visual arts collective, and founder Jeff Donaldson’s belief that “art was functional and should be utilized as propaganda … for practical application to oppression that engulfed Black America and the African Diaspora” (67). Yet prior to the Black Arts Movement, black artists grappled with strategies for creating pragmatic black art that provided strategies for resisting racial oppression. The African-American spiritual “Wade in the Water” offered instructions of how slaves could use rivers to avoid bloodhounds and escape to freedom. Artists such as Augusta Savage and Romare Bearden faced racial discrimination in their careers and created art that advocated for African-American social equality. Black art has never assumed an “apartness from the praxis of life” (Bürger 27). Far from being institutionalized, black art has been entrenched—through music, hair, dance, to name but a few modalities— into everyday black culture. AfroSurreal texts tend to investigate those realities. Socially engaged black art questions how the individualized self can be developed without community, resists the notion of art’s “independence from society,” and instead seeks to understand communal histories and values (Bürger 35). Pym and boy snow bird reveal how history and community develop the individual self, and they do so by allowing African-American histories and cultures to interrupt dominant, and possibly more familiar, Europeancentered narratives. Told from the perspective of black, racially ambiguous, or mixed-race protagonists, Pym and boy snow bird confront the idea of white racial purity through stories that disrupt dominant Eurocentric narratives.

AfroSurreal and magical real 27 Poe’s only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, is reimagined in Johnson’s work as a representation of the white American literary tradition and the idea of the frontier. Oyeyemi’s novel appears to reference Edgar Taylor’s version of Snow White, which popularized the Grimm Brothers’ tale by adding illustrations, reinforcing “the English elements,” reducing “gruesome” scenes, and suggesting the values of white middleclass and upper-class society (Bronner 194–197). Both Poe’s novel and Taylor’s Snow White elevate white aesthetics and standards of beauty through language that associate whiteness with goodness. If a society is to extol whiteness, while rejecting blackness, then blackness has to be firmly separated from—and rejected by—whiteness. This often involves the absolute rejection and denigration known as “abjection.” As Julia Kristeva reminds us, what is abjected cannot “permeate” the subject, otherwise the subject loses its sense of self (11). In the same way, black voices cannot “enter” traditionally European-centered texts without being mocked or altered, for to represent black voices authentically, in all their complexity, would disrupt whiteness. Language, in Pym and boy snow bird, through the insertion of black voices—the voices that mainstream culture attempts to abject— into white narratives blurs whiteness, disrupts Western notion of time, and alters how we read the original hypotext. Toni Morrison argues that “the most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction” in a work “is its language—its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked, and unmasking language” (“Unspeakable Things,” 11). The language of Pym and boy snow bird confronts and disrupts whiteness; the black protagonist’s voice, though situated in majority-white environments, clashes with Western notions of modernity, logic, and progress. Literary scholar Mae Henderson has described the heteroglossia existing within black women’s texts and investigates Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, which responds to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, as an example of black women “rewriting the conventional and canonical stories, as well as revising the conventional generic forms that convey these stories” (70). This type of rewriting and revisiting appears true for Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird, and although Johnson is not a black woman, perhaps one could argue that other black or multiethnic voices can also agitate and disrupt dominant discourses. Associating primitivism within a modern, industrialized country may seem counterintuitive, but in majority white countries, minorities and people of color have been labeled “primitive.” Mitchell Roger argues that some artists privilege primitive art because in the primitive exists a recognition of how we “have lost a tribal or communal sense of ourselves” (145). Further, Roger argues, “It may be true of primitive culture … that history is cyclic and ritual rather than linear and unique. But we are not primitive anymore” (146). Roger suggests that the primitive may be associated with cycles and tradition (oral historian Walter Ong makes a similar

28 AfroSurreal and magical real argument in reference to oral cultures), while modern culture is that which is linear and progressive. But who is the “we” and who defines “primitive”? Slavoj Žižek reminds us of the misconception of ahistorical “pre-capitalist societies” that existed outside of a seemingly futuristic capitalist system (15–16). Catherine Ramirez argues that people of color have been “erased from the future,” are often invisible in the present, public forums, and “fixed in a primitive and racialized past” (188). This concept of the primitive, whether exalted and romanticized or marginalized and denigrated, has been developed from a European perspective. In the Grundisse, Karl Marx describes this “so-called historical presentation of development” of civilization. Marx associates societal complexity with the “modern bourgeois society” and argues that a society’s art is tied (usually) with a civilization’s linear development. Marx’s words, when considered alongside such diverse thinkers as Ramirez, Žižek, Ong, and Roger, indicates our conceptions of temporality, our understandings of what it means to be “primitive” or futuristic, may be tied to culture. Some Afrofuturist philosophies, such as the Black Quantum Theory advanced by Rasheedah Phillips, question whether we should define history (western philosophy defines cultures without written language as prehistoric) as a precursor to the present, as part of a linear movement from the primitive to civilization. Afrofuturist Tobias c. van Veen also resists the idea of a linear timeline that positions black people as primitive, as slavery disrupted collective historical memories and prevents the past from being fully realized: “the violence of enslavement sought to erase the past, rituals, religions, and language” (87). The concept that black people developed a new modernism is explored in the works of writers, such as Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, whose work may be considered AfroSurreal. AfroSurrealism, I suggest, offers alternative conceptions of temporality, and ultimately, modernity. This alternative, even abject conception of temporality and modernity, is evident in Pym. Within the first sentences, Johnson evokes the stylized subordinate clauses of nineteenth-century writings in order to parody a Western notion of modernity and the primitive: Upon my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere, which you can read about in the pages that follow, I found myself in the company of several men, who were deeply interested in the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public. (3) Johnson’s recreation of nineteenth-century language, when juxtaposed with his comic insertion of modern language and references, challenges time as linear and progressive. In the passage, Chris Jaynes reveals that he has

AfroSurreal and magical real 29 “barely cracked” his “laptop,” that he wishes not to be sued by the “__Cola corporation” (4). Johnson’s juxtaposition of contemporary vernacular—“barely cracked” and “laptop”—with highly stylized nineteenth-century language, including an underscore before Cola, adds to Pym’s irony (3). In his postmodern short story, “Welcome to the Funhouse,” novelist John Barth points out that, in the nineteenth century, underscores and initials “were used to ‘enhance the illusion of reality’,” and make it appear as though real names had been omitted “for reasons of tact or legal liability.” These constructions problematize how we, as readers, interpret language and its ability to mark temporality: how should we define time, Pym proposes, especially when language—one of our primary methods for recording and attempting to preserve it—can be so easily manipulated? In Johnson’s text, fact and fiction become difficult to separate, as a historicized writing style asserts its way into the present, challenging conventional temporal distinctions and creating what scholar and poet Evie Shockley has described as a “textual re-vision of ‘blackness’” (196). Johnson purposefully draws parallels between himself and his protagonist: Jaynes tells his story as “an assistant professor of language and literature at Bard College” (6). (Mat Johnson taught African-American fiction at Bard College.) The author-as-character storytelling device draws from a tradition as early as Chaucer and the idea of authors being in their characters’ “fellowship anon.” And then there are Johnson’s footnotes, which fuse fourteenth-century language with hip-hop colloquialisms, appear rooted in Black Quantum Theory, a philosophy, Rasheedah Phillips writes, that advances “a new approach to … experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of spacetime.” Johnson’s footnotes highlight science (DNA and genetic testing) and connect his work to other black speculative texts that often describe “the relationship of science and the application of technology in various African societies” (Anderson and Jones). These footnotes purposefully question the efficacy of traditional scholarship while inserting references to black history (Matthew Henson, the first African-American to explore the North Pole), and literature (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man). In this way, Johnson creates an innovative, but tradition-rooted dialect. Eric Sundquist has written that dialect “pays tribute to those who have gone before” and serves as “an index of what has been kept alive in the evolving cultural memory of song, folktale, and everyday language” (60). Further, Sundquist finds that “[d]ialect might be the linguistic tool best able to show that the bondage of language could also be liberating” (46). Pym’s hybrid language—its mix of black vernacular and its references to nineteenth-century writing conventions, critical theory, popular culture, African-American folklore, science, and myths—produces an emancipatory effect, in which marginalized voices are given the same (or greater) weight as more privileged ones. In other words, a kind of postmodern dialect. Pym emphasizes the ideas—the connections between spirituality and technology, the temporal dislocations lodged within the present—through

30 AfroSurreal and magical real language. As Chris Jaynes narrates his discovery of a book written by Dirk Peters, a character in Poe’s novel who is referenced in Pym, Johnson references both scientific descriptions and imaginary locations: Longitude 33.4 and latitude 34.3. What we today know as Morter’s Point on the Ross Ice Shelf … in the right place, at the right time, aimed at the right direction, what Dirk Peter’ notes told me is that you could sail from there off this frozen continent to a hidden tropical utopia within a few days of floating. I knew this in my heart: that if I found the right place at those coordinates and launched a vessel from it at the right time of the month, that regardless of global warming or centuries, the path to the isle of Tsalal would still be viable. (67) Pym blends realistic sounding details—Ross Ice Shelf is a real place in Antarctica, global warming is an often-studied phenomenon—with specific information (“longitude 33.4 and latitude 34.3”) about an imaginary place (67). By locating Dirk Peters on an imaginary isle where regardless of “centuries,” the path to it still endures, Johnson establishes a timeline where Poe’s vision is located within a continuous imaginary (40). When Chris Jaynes insists that Dirk Peters, who is Native American in Poe’s novel, is actually black and provides historical reasons why this could be true, Johnson effectively disrupts Poe’s narrative authority. Jaynes claims that, historically, a black person might claim Indian heritage in order to gain greater opportunities, but in the present day, Jaynes also encounters Mahalia Mathis, a black woman who claims to be of Native American ancestry and a descendent of Dirk Peters. The continuity between the eighteenth-century Dirk Peters and the contemporaneous Mahalia Mathis represents ongoing racial oppression in black communities, a timeline in which prejudice cannot be simply placed in the past. Pym recreates a nonlinear concept of time in which the present is continuously influenced and shaped by the past. Yet Jaynes’ own love for black people challenges or undermines the Dirk Peters/Mahalia Mathis perspective as the only way of experiencing blackness. The AfroSurreal text examines how Jaynes’ questioning of societal authorities and his passion for black literature and culture allow him to survive difficult circumstances and resist dominant worldviews. Pym follows Jaynes’ trip to Antarctica to locate the Tsalal tribe after failing to receive tenure. Jaynes’ love interest has moved on, though she and an all-black crew join Jaynes in Antarctica, where he experiences a number of strange events—he meets Pym, the titular character from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and he enters a strange, white-washed world created by the painter Thomas Karvel. Most significantly, he is enslaved by a race of humanoids—the Tekelians. Johnson reimagines the black-skinned natives found in Poe’s novel whom Poe describes as monstrous or strange,

AfroSurreal and magical real 31 describing the Tekeli-li in the same grotesque terms as Poe, but coding the corresponding images as white. Jaynes alludes to Poe’s actual descriptions in Pym, which highlights the racism embedded in Poe’s story, as Poe’s black-skinned “big mouth animalistic pygmies” are reimagined as having “pale blue eyes … darting acute orbs bobbed over noses so long and pointy,” hair “straight and brittle … completely devoid of coloring” (25–125). Immediately following this description, Johnson suggests the unnaturalness of white supremacy, by having Jaynes meet Poe’s Pym, a man who, in this contemporary tale, would have had to be “over two hundred years old” (134). Yet Pym’s age is less strange than his deference to the Tekeli-li, whom he describes as Gods. Jaynes, who sees the Tekeli-li as nothing less than frightening, decides Pym is an “exceptionally delusional white man,” and Pym becomes a stand-in for a culture that worships whiteness (141). Johnson’s parody of nineteenth-century language generates laughs but also serves a serious purpose: the language highlights the African-American protagonist’s position as an amalgamation of European and African cultures and disrupts a linear, progressive timeline. Du Bois’s theory of doubleconsciousness can be linked to the polyphony woven through the text to underscore the difficulty of determining what, exactly, race is. Jaynes is a light-skinned, racially mixed black man in a culture where “[e]ither you are a Negro or you’re not … half whiteness is not allowed” (25). Johnson purposefully exploits this irony through Antarctica, a snowy site of whiteness serving as the home of the Tsalal, a black people. Johnson’s text poses significant questions: in Western culture, does blackness serve a purpose other than to make whiteness more white? And if so, then what is the ideology, the philosophy, behind blackness? Johnson suggests that blackness exists as hypernym, as a broad, encompassing space where difference and multiplicity can flourish in a non-hierarchical state. Jaynes’ existence—as both mulatto and as black, as an individual who experiences the supernatural and as a scholar who exalts science—dramatizes this concept. Johnson suggests that blackness resists hierarchies and Neo-platonic divides between the soul and the intellect. Jaynes facetiously states, the “[s]uperstitious Negro mind is no match for the Enlightenment European intellect” and documents the supernatural events that occur alongside the all-black crew’s love for science and exploration (25). Under this worldview, the supernatural and scientific are not incompatible, and to reject science is also to discard some fundamental aspect of blackness. When Mahalia Mathis sends Jaynes “a severed human head, sockets empty,” the “brown skull resting on a puzzle of aged skeleton pieces” so that he can prove that Dirk Peters, her ancestor, is not of African descent, Mathis’ rejection of her blackness also becomes a rejection of science (85). Jaynes grows even more curious about both the science and myth behind Poe’s tale, while Mathis, who disowns her scientific DNA test when it reveals she has African ancestry, experiences a disavowal of blackness that marks her as absurd, and to some degree, mentally unstable.

32 AfroSurreal and magical real One could argue that the surreal events in the novel are the result of Jaynes’ depression, that his encounters with Pym and the Tekeli-li are mere delusions resulting from a depression associated with unemployment and a failed romance. Yet in Johnson’s imaginary world, it seems far more likely that the protagonist’s experiences originate from the absurdity of racism. Jaynes, the college’s only black male professor, is fired for his refusal to serve on an ineffectual diversity committee, and his experiences as “a black man who looks white” and has lived his life learning “to talk blacker, walk blacker than even my peers” reveals the absurdity of racism (135–137). Racism is a real phenomenon, with real consequences, but because race can be performed and constructed, blacks experience a rootlessness, the “wish to be in the majority within a nation you could call your own, to wish for the complete power of the state behind you.” In the Black Speculative Arts Movement manifesto, Afrofuturist scholar Reynaldo Anderson argues that, in black speculative fiction, “magic is a gateway into the study of science.” Pym (and, as I’ll show, boy snow bird) produce this gateway by blending supernatural events with scientific truth. These kinds of allegorical texts thus create a language marked by hybridity and insights into “a collective shadow” that, as Marie-Louise von Franz suggests, encompasses both the repressed aspects of the individual personality and the repressed desires of a cultural group (9). Surreal texts reveal the cogency of von Franz’s position. Bruno Solarik, writing of the Czech and Slovak Surrealists, suggests that different cultural groups within Surrealism may hold different values and beliefs, as Surrealism results from a “collaborative activity” and is “based not on a kind of orthodoxy” or a specific position (1). Surrealism demonstrates the dialectic of “desire and protest” and produces a general questioning of dominant cultural thought (1–3). Pym examines this dialectic. At the end of the novel, Chris reaches his final destination and, he explains, “[I]n relief, in exhaustion, I let out a yell that was no rational word, just pure emotion” (321). The irony of Chris’s search for scientific, rational evidence leading him to a fantastical place and “pure emotion” becomes representative of the black experience and the senselessness of rationality in an irrational world. AfroSurrealism opposes binaristic representations of science and magic, while revealing the hybrid, complex, and sometimes contradictory dreams and desires of survivors in the African Diaspora. boy snow bird and rethinking primitivism The controversies surrounding the term “magical realism” have intensified as scholars grow more aware of magical realism’s various manifestations. Wendy Faris reminds us that the “status of magical realism, its widespread popularity, and the critical use of the term are the subject of debate” because it is exalted by some as “a significant decolonizing style, permitting new voices and traditions to be heard within the mainstream” and “denigrated by others as

AfroSurreal and magical real 33 a commodifying kind of primitivism” (101–102). Faris also argues for the importance of examining “the global presence of magical realism” and “its different manifestations” in order to better understand magical realism as a postcolonial literature that upsets traditional nexuses of power. In addition to Faris, multiple scholars have worked to establish magical realism as its own specific genre. Angel Flores employs one of the earliest uses of the term in his study of innovative Latin American texts. Seeking language to describe the specific qualities of fiction that investigate the “transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal,” Flores allows magical realism to designate fiction exploring alternative ways of representing time and reality (190–192). Amaryll Chanady argues that magic is understood as dangerous in the Western tradition as it serves as a “threat to reason (as well as to personal safety) in the European fantastic” and is “antimonious with respect to the laws of reason.” Chanady cites the acceptance of magic—the supernatural is experienced “without any comment by the magic realist narrator” as one of the defining qualities of magical realism (431). As magical realism has grown more defined, some scholars and artists have questioned whether the term accurately describes the creative work of the African Diaspora and people of color. Toni Morrison views the term as ambiguous and a less than useful descriptor6 (Davis 149). In a discussion of Ben Okri’s novels, Jude Chudi Okpala describes magical realism as a term that “depoliticizes and traduces” Okri’s work and “weakens and uproots [Nigerians’] cultural difference from the West’s own semblance” (qtd. in Sasser 110). While some writers or critics see the label “magical realism” as merely inaccurate, others believe the term is more pernicious and an attempt to exoticize non-Western cultures. Rachel Tudor has argued that magical realism is premised on spurious racialist notions of an “erudite,” “rational,” and “empirical” European “supercivilization” juxtaposed against a “primitive” and “archaic” American Indian mentality (3). Anthropologist Michael Taussig makes a similar contention, finding [T]oo often the wonder that sustains the stories of Carpentier, José Arguedas, Miguel Angel Asturias, or García Márquez is represented in accord with a long-standing tradition of folklore, the exotic, and indigenismo that, in oscillating between the cute and the romantic, is little more than the standard ruling class appropriation of … the sensual vitality of the common people and their fantasy life. (qtd. in Faris 166) The Western association of folklore with the past, as well as its linkage of people of color with myths and oral history, forms a temporality lodging people of color in the past. Magical realism’s fraught current usage results, in part, from what it suggests about people of color and their relationship to temporality. Black and Third World people’s alternate

34 AfroSurreal and magical real ideas and manifestations of temporality serve as the phenomenological foundation for a range of theories concerning knowledge, authority, and beauty. What does a text such as boy snow bird suggest about knowledge systems and rethinking temporality and the primitive? Other texts from outside western culture reveal different worldviews, but should these texts be labeled “magical realism”? One could argue that boy snow bird’s exploration of strange events engenders magical realism; however, it diverges from magical realism in its manifestation of the weird or strange. Magic is a precise system, and does not necessarily produce a salubrious effect, but the AfroSurreal text allows the supernatural to spur personal growth. Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird contains references to several African and African-American folktales, yet it incorporates these ideas to challenge primitivism and to explore less examined black histories and perspectives. Oyeyemi’s folktales operate as counternarratives disrupting linear conceptions of time, challenging racially oppressive systems, and spawning alternative conceptions of temporality, beauty, and intelligence. Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird is, in some ways, a reclamation project that uses black cosmologies and storytelling to re-establish a mentally resilient black consciousness. It reimagines a European fairy tale, yet does so by inserting African and African-American histories and re-coding Eurocentric languages to reflect the protagonist’s point of view. Perhaps boy snow bird can be best described, if not as traditional magical realism, then as an alternative or related form. African literature scholar Harry Garuba has suggested Animist Realism as a term to describe how magic and technology can coexist. Garuba seeks to distinguish Animist Realism from magical realism through an argument for “an animist conception of the world … much larger in scope and dimension than the concept of magical realism” (274). Animism, Garuba posits, is not a religious system, but a philosophy in which spirits are located within animals and objects. It arises from a form of consciousness that makes possible the “colonization” of modern technologies by situating science and technology within the field of understood and familiar magic (265). Some scholars argue that a capitalist society, with its heavy focus on labor and technological advancements, saps humans of their vitality and enchantment with the world. Garuba calls on animist unconscious as a way of thinking that “assimilates” magic into modern world so that “a persistent re-enchantment thus occurs” (Garuba 267). The Animist philosophy does not reject science, but allows for a mental flexibility that accommodates multiple ways of understanding the world. Garuba argues that Animist Realism has been misunderstood by the West. Garuba’s thesis, which centers on “retraditionalization of Africa,” does not argue for a separation of the modern and traditional ways of life. Garuba suggests that the West has structured Animism in opposition to modernity and “the clash of cultures” produces the “agony of the man or woman caught in the throes of opposing conceptions of the world and of

AfroSurreal and magical real 35 social life” (264–270). AfroSurrealism, like Animist Realism, seeks to usurp “the authority of Western science,” yet the variance arises from the degree of certainty concerning the magical system. For Garuba, Animist Realism operates “by reinscribing the authority of magic within the interstices of the rational/secular/modern” (271). AfroSurrealism, on the other hand, questions magic’s authority, by continuously hesitating between magic or science, or perhaps, offering scientific explanations for supernatural events. For instance, the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston,7 in a description of the tradition of “conversion visions” found in African-American churches simultaneously describes fantastic omens (talking suns and moving trees) as real, actual events while providing psychological explanations for their occurrence (85–86). The weird, strange events in an AfroSurreal text suggest magic, but also offer alternative explanations. Emotional trauma, hallucinogenic drugs, or some other form of psychological problem could be responsible for an AfroSurreal text’s strange events. The lack of certainty over the precise cause of the event reflects the particularities of life after the Middle Passage. The uncertainty of surviving the voyage; the lack of clarity concerning one’s ancestral background once family members are bought and sold; and generations growing up under a new culture and language with looser cultural ties, produce absences. Time forms a tesseract that includes geographical space and distance, as Animist Realism and AfroSurrealism challenge the idea that temporality must only be understood as linear; both dismantle the western concept of modernity. Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird demonstrates how past and more recent racial oppression may occur within the same text, and the ways the novel’s hesitation between the supernatural and “reality” reveals the oddness of socially constructed race. In boy snow bird, set in 1930s and 1960s, New York during periods of racial and social upheaval can be described as an AfroSurreal text due to the black and mixed-race characters’ specific cultural histories and geographies, and the uncertainty about the role and extent of magic in their lives. Yet, animal spirits also loom large. The novel contains multiple references to rats and spiders, yet Oyeyemi’s heritage—she is Nigerian-American—complicates whether the text should be discussed as Animist Realist or AfroSurreal. I argue that the anthropomorphization in Oyeyemi’s novel performs a similar function as those discussed in Garuba’s Animist Realist texts. Still, Garuba’s argument about the “retraditionalization of Africa” may not hold true in the Americas because physical distance made it harder for many traditions to survive. Brent Hayes Edwards has written of the necessity of understanding Diaspora through differences and attempts to repair fractures and mistranslations across cultures (66). The term “Diaspora” reveals the complexity and variations within black culture. I wish to address that Oyeyemi’s setting provides a specific history and context for conceptualizing the work as an AfroSurreal text related to—but with a few features distinct from—Animist Realism.

36 AfroSurreal and magical real “African-American” is itself an ambiguous phrase, making it difficult to neatly separate the “African-American” from the “American-African”; there may be overlap. Oyeyemi is Nigerian-American. She was born in Nigeria, but lived most of her life in the United States, and boy snow bird contains references to both African and African-American folklore. In addition, although the novel focuses primarily on black-centered folklore, Oyeyemi also references the history and mythologies of other people of color. On the same page in which Oyeyemi references the African-American folk heroine Annie Christmas, an Asian father soothes his child with words from Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa: “O snail/Climb Mount Fuji/But slowly, slowly!” The parallel use of these unusual images that seem to stand outside of time— Annie Christmas seeming to defy death and the tiny snail patiently climbing Japan’s highest mountain—serve as a reminder of how different cultures structure or think about time. Time is a culturally specific phenomenon, reflected in both language and in our measurements of time. These ideas are apparent in multiple cultures of the African Diaspora: some Creole dialects may contain “verbs … unmarked for tense” and do not necessarily distinguish between past, present, and future verbs (van de Vate 19); the Dogon of Mali have a five-day week calendar (Adjaye 86). The recognition that cultural differences affect our conceptions of time has led scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty to call for a historiography that recognizes “difference” and moves away from “the continuist conception of time in historicism to times which may well be out of joint with one another” (qtd. in Garuba 269). Chakrabarty also suggests that our understanding of temporality has implications for understanding Marx: A rather similar epistemological proposition underlies Marx’s use of categorieslike “bourgeois” and “prebourgeois” or “capital” and “precapital.” The prefix pre here signifies a relationship that is both chronological and theoretical. The coming of the bourgeois or capitalist society, Marx argues in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, gives rise for the first time to a history that can be apprehended through a philosophical and universal category, “capital.” History becomes … knowable. (3) People of color are outside of Marx’s economic history, which forces new ways of exploring and theorizing about the economy and the human condition. While Garuba makes a cogent argument of how Marxist politics and Animist Realism can reinforce each other,8 I argue the animal spirits in boy snow bird allow for an understanding of temporality that allows for Oyeyemi’s non-western critique of capitalism. The capitalist critique Oyeyemi suggests is less rooted in a Marxist view of history than in its own form of black anarchy, as her characters seek freedom from a central ruling authority, even if that rule is in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

AfroSurreal and magical real 37 Through the characters’ rejection of authorities (parents, business owners), Oyeyemi’s novel suggests an anti-capitalist, libertarian socialist program. In boy snow bird, a poor white woman, Boy, grows up with an abusive father, known for most of the novel by his occupation—“the rat catcher.” In these moments, the father’s cruelty seems more fantastic than the nightmarish ratfilled cages in Boy’s basement, which are filled with “the smells of sweat” and “panicking, starving” rats (5). The rats take on human characteristics—a quality Garuba describes as characteristic of Animist Realism—when the father punishes Boy for going on a date by hitting her and tying her to a chair: I woke up in the basement with the rats. I tried to lift myself out of the chair I was in, but my arms were tied behind me and my ankles were so tightly bound to the chair legs that they already felt broken. There was no light, and the rats crunched on the newsprint that lined their cages. The rat catcher loomed over me and I smelled wet fur. The blinded creature he held paddled the air with its front paws. A paw thudded against my forehead, but if I hadn’t see it happen, I wouldn’t have known. No part of my face would move. (121–122) In the above passage, the rats seem to possess near-fantastic powers, as strangely, Boy can feel the pain of being “tightly bound” to the chair, but she is unable to feel the rat’s paws, even though it “thudded against” her forehead (122). In the Yoruba religion, “the rat is the sacred animal familiar of Elegba,” who has been “called the God of Mischief” (Edwards and Mason 14–17). During the heart of Boy’s terror, her father becomes as mythical as Elegba, and just as the rat serves as a manifestation of Elegba, they come to represent her father’s anger, fear, and sadness. Boy’s father becomes inseparable from the rats the moment he leans over her, and she smells “wet fur” (122). When Boy’s father starts crying, the rat falls “limp and lay[s] its head on my cheek … exhausted and childlike” (123). “Childlike” and “exhausted” are human characteristics, and Oyeyemi’s use of those words reflects both an anthormophologized animist spirit, and perhaps, Boy’s father’s feelings about his socio-economic status: he has effectively entered the “rat race.” Boy and Boy’s father’s whiteness feels unstable because of their class. Whiteness scholar Jun Mian Chen suggests that white people experience asymmetrical power due to class, and I’d argue that this lack of economic power, when coupled with their uncertainty about their ancestry, situates Boy and Boy’s father in spaces coded as non-white (19–20). Though Boy later marries a black man, Arturo, and gives birth to a black or mixed-race daughter, Bird, Oyeyemi suggests that Boy’s socio-economic status—Boy’s father’s work as a low-paying job as a rat-catcher—also positions her nonwhite spaces. We first witness the conflation of race and socio-economic status when Boy’s mother is raped, and she goes to a Harlem women’s

38 AfroSurreal and magical real shelter that is “[m]ainly for nonwhite women but they didn’t automatically turn you away if you were white” (294). Boy’s mother then decides to change her name from Francine to Frank, live as Boy’s father, and share a room “on a strict twelve-hour basis—from six in the morning to six in the evening the room was Frank’s”—in a boarding house (295). Boy’s father’s gender also leads to poverty; Frank ends up taking “jobs that didn’t require documentation” so that he won’t have to disclose his gender. These jobs are coded as non-white as they have “a high turnover of illegal immigrant employees” (295). Boy does not learn the gender of her father’s birth until she is well into adulthood, and Boy’s lack of knowledge about her family background leads her mother-in-law, Olivia Whitman, who has been passing as a white woman, to question Boy’s whiteness: Next she implied that my background was questionable. She didn’t know where I was really from, she hadn’t met my father, she’d taken everything I said on trust. “Nice try, but I’m not going to stand here while a colored woman tries to tell me that maybe I’m the one who’s colored.” (134) Boy’s marriage to Arturo, who, like his mother, Olivia, has been passing for white, further complicates ideas about the intersections of race and class. Arturo has a daughter, Snow, from a previous relationship with a black woman who appeared white. Snow appears white, despite having more African ancestry than Bird, who has a white mother. Whiteness in these chapters is associated with fear. The search for better economic opportunities leads to the decision to pass for white, but comes with a new set of anxieties. The desire to leave the south, a place where “you couldn’t vote unless you passed a literacy test” or use a “white restroom,” and head to a freer, more economically mobile north where one’s racial background is unknown is replaced with the fear of being exposed as black (134–135). These fears are examined through the lens of strange or magical occurrences. Oyeyemi’s emphasis on animal spirits suggests Animist Realism, but boy snow bird’s uncertainty about the role and extent of magic in the characters’ lives marks the text as AfroSurreal. AfroSurrealism is related to Animist Realism, but its positioning of the supernatural produces a different aesthetic tension. In this discussion, I attempt to avoid both the elision of differences and engaging in what Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo has termed “binaristic blackness,” the privileging of one black experience over another. By carefully considering how Animist Realism and AfroSurrealism diverge and converge, we develop a better understanding of both philosophies. The absences and longing in African-American culture for home—specific ties to cultural traditions—facilitate the creation of new myths and, I argue, AfroSurreal texts. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-prize winning Beloved,

AfroSurreal and magical real 39 which explores these connections, is described as an AfroSurreal text by scholar Terri Francis and in 2018 articles published in The Guardian and Slate. However, Garuba, a professor of African literature based in South Africa, writes of Beloved, a tale of slavery in the Americas as an example of Animist Realism. Beloved highlights the cultural intricacy and intellectual sophistication of what Brent Hayes Edwards terms the “complex field of influence and debate” located in black surrealisms and related movements (193). Two former slaves, Sethe and Paul D, interact with objects—the Chinaberry tree on Sethe’s back and Paul D’s tobacco tin—that as Garuba points out, seem animated, spirited beings. Garuba makes an excellent case for Beloved as an Animist Realist text: the novel’s magic seems to be accepted and incorporated. Yet hesitation between the physical and psychological world defines the AfroSurreal text, and I suggest the psychological trauma Sethe and Paul D undergo allows us to read the text in multiple ways. If the tree on Sethe’s back is a “living, growing dimension of the roots of her sorrow,” then perhaps the novel can be read as a metaphor for her psychological state, or “the magical world is real and ever-present” (274). Morrison has described her interest in “black folklore” and says “most of her novels are very much like folktale endings” (Brown 464). In a folktale, a riddle-like story prompts the listener to develop her own solution or moral. AfroSurreal texts elicit an uncertainty, and the reader must decide how to interpret the text and how to proceed imaginatively. As Morrison has said of her novel’s endings, they are “open-ended; they don’t close and shut the door” (Brown 464). The characters in boy snow bird do comment on the magic, which distinguishes them from magical realism or Animist Realism, where magic is accepted as fact. Oyeyemi appears to celebrate uncertainty and provides a list of six different possibilities for what appears to be a supernatural phenomenon: Bird’s inability to see herself in the mirror. Bird wonders if her lack of reflection is due to “an optical illusion or a symptom of eye disease,” the possibility that she is not human (a vampire), a good or evil spell, a mental disturbance (“I’m a nut job”); Bird also wonders if other people do not see their reflections but just do not talk about it (162–163). Through the lack of reflections, Oyeyemi suggests that beauty and race are optical illusions, rooted in binaristic and hierarchical Western thought, as it is only the black or mixed-race characters who are unable to see their reflections. Boy, who sees her reflection and initially finds it “trustworthy” (3), begins to question appearances only after the birth of her mixed-race daughter. Yet Oyeyemi has posed questions about the validity of appearances since the book’s opening. Boy’s appearance (Boy has white-blond hair and black eyes), ambiguously gendered first name, unusual surname, “Novak” (a reference to Kim Novak, the actress from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo), all work to magnify the ambiguous and illusory nature of race and physical appearance. Boy’s bleached hair and black eyes mark her as both white and dark, and while she is

40 AfroSurreal and magical real described as outwardly feminine, her first name implies masculinity even as her surname recalls the visual deception in Vertigo. Boy’s disparate qualities create an uncanny effect. We’re unable to neatly place her. Snow, a mixed-race girl who has white skin, is considered more beautiful than her sister by their friends and classmates, than Bird, a mixed-race girl who has brown skin. Even though Snow has more African heritage than Bird, Boy believes Snow will be treated more kindly by the world because of her perceived whiteness: Snow’s beauty is all the more precious … because it’s a trick. When whites look at her, they don’t get whatever fleeting, ugly impressions so many of us get when we see a colored girl standing there … What can I do for my daughter? One day soon a wall will come up between us, and I won’t be able to follow her behind it. (139) Oyeyemi’s text reveals how our perceptions of beauty are based on optical illusions, and how these conceptions of beauty are associated with temporality. Boy recognizes the western gaze as controlling, quick (“fleeting”), and superficial (“a trick”). While AfroSurrealism’s specific examination of race as an illusion may mark it as different from Animist Realism, the AfroSurreal movement isn’t exactly magical realism. Several artists and scholars have argued for recognizing the specific lineages and traditions of non-European arts movements. In “On the Marvelous Real in America,” Alejandro Carpentier argued for the marvelous real on the basis of its specific history, one that distinguished it from Surrealism (83–84). Hannah Widdifield finds a specific Latin Americanness embedded in magical realism, and also recognizes an overlap between Surrealism and magical realism: A version of magical realism had, of course, existed as an artistic movement in Germany and as a relatively undefined regional subgenre that responded to what many artists considered the shortcomings of realism and a need to create a distinctly Latin American brand of literature. But as the movement gained momentum and more literary critics were interested in the scholarly merits of magical realism, it became all too easy to continue likening it to the already established surrealism of Europe. Indeed, many early writers of the movement, such as Arturo Uslar Pietri and Alejo Carpentier, used surrealist techniques throughout their literary careers. (1) Perhaps it is easy to connect Latin magical realism to Surrealism because the Surrealists had long-expressed admiration for Latin American culture, as suggested by their support for the Latin-influenced work of Afro-Cuban

AfroSurreal and magical real 41 Wifredo Lam and the French Benjamin Péret, despite the “generally hostile reception of Surrealism in Brazil” (Ginway 545). Art historian Louise Tythacott further details the Surrealists’ interest in the cultural Other, which they celebrated, rather than denigrated (49). The Surrealists were genuinely interested in other cultures but sometimes found it hard to escape the confines of Western thinking. These challenges are reflected in their construction of the primitive. Tythacott discusses how the Surrealists turned to what they viewed as “the primitive” in an attempt to locate new sources of creativity (50). Primitivism relies on a series of binary constructions of modernity, society, and progress, even when those concepts are examined through a non-hierarchical lens, or when the non-Western culture is privileged or romanticized. All forms of Surrealism question the efficacy of logic as the only valid way of understanding the world. Still, AfroSurreal texts, such as boy snow bird, question primitivism and offer a specific resistance to Western notions of progress and modernity. Oyeyemi creates moments where the characters may possibly experience an actual invisibility that seems tied to the supernatural, but there are also moments when black invisibility is tied firmly to an ontological black reality. As Olivia, Arturo’s mother, tells Boy the reasons that the family has passed for white, Oyeyemi demonstrates the ways that blackness has been rendered invisible: The places you go to, do you see colored people there? Let me answer that for you. You see them rarely, if at all. You’re trying to remember but the truth is they don’t exist for you. You go to the operahouse and the only colored person you see is the stagehand, scattering sawdust or rice powder. (137) Oyeyemi introduces the idea that blackness “scatters” or disrupts whiteness (“rice powder”), even when its presence grows difficult to detect. Yet, as mentioned, Oyeyemi’s novel also embodies supernatural moments, such as when “‘the technically impossible’” phenomena occur and two girls, with African ancestry, look into the mirror and do not see their images or their reflections do not mirror their physical actions (265). Given the psychological complexity of not being seen when one is actually present, it is difficult to determine whether Oyeyemi wants us to understand these moments as literal truth. In boy snow bird, only the black characters exist in this strange, illogical space where supernatural events occur, and in western society, spaces disassociated with reason have traditionally been marked as primitive. So if it is true that the avant-garde sought in primitivism and non-Western cultures a repudiation of a European worldview privileging progress, logic, and rationality, then the AfroSurreal text raises a series of problematic questions: do black people view themselves as primitive, irrational, or particularly emotional? Should we attempt to define the word primitive—or separate it from Western values?

42 AfroSurreal and magical real Phetogo Tshepo Mahasha argues for thinking tied to language, and subsequently, believes terms associated with European arts movements, limit black creativity. The term “AfroSurrealism” may be an imprecise word for narratives that feature a black protagonist, exploit ruptures in linear temporality, and hesitate between the real and the fantastic, but as Garuba points out in his coining of the term Animist Realism, such language may help us more precisely investigate aesthetic approaches. Language that attempts to describe culturally specific aesthetic approaches “moves the argument away from the charge of essentialism” and helps to “avoid … cultural binarisms” (Garuba 265). And if we manage to think beyond paradigms, which, in the words of Chakrabarty, make Europe the “silent referent in historical knowledge,” then we develop new opportunities for shaping society (2). AfroSurrealism employs history, folktales, and myths to create a nonlinear timeline forged from alternate realities or sometimes conflicting or shifting perspectives, rather than one concrete truth. This rejection of western temporality makes it difficult to describe a particular culture as primitive. Snow learns about Brer Anansi and Othello from her Uncle John, the “sharecropper somewhere in North Carolina” who ends up in jail for responding to racialized violence (212). Uncle John’s knowledge consists of both folklore and encyclopedic knowledge of American history and literature (213). His intersecting knowledge creates a tension between the language and knowledge associated with black vernacular and the language and information associated with mainstream culture. Rather than binaristic representation of primitive versus modern, Oyeyemi’s text functions as a reminder of the truly hybrid nature of black knowledge and boy snow bird’s refusal of the term primitive. Oyeyemi further challenges the connection of black expression and primitivism through the Anansi folktale, which is revisited and reinterpreted alongside the Snow White tale and Bird’s own original folktale. Because of Boy’s understanding of racism and America’s “ugly impressions” of blacks, she becomes the cruel stepmother of the classic fairytale. Boy, overly determined that Bird not grow up believing that the white-skinned child is necessarily “the fairest of them all,” sends Snow away to live with relatives (144). Boy’s acknowledgment that Snow’s beauty, which is associated with whiteness, is “a trick” is reinforced by Oyeyemi’s numerous references to Anansi, the classic trickster in African folktales. Bird grows up hearing about Anansi and “knows at least fifteen stories” about him (221); Bird also feels a special affinity for spiders’ physical presence and “enjoys the stealthy company of spiders” (171); Boy kills four spiders after a discussion about Snow’s privilege with her sister (196). The spiders represent deception, the “trick” of beauty. Tellingly, at this point, Oyeyemi inserts Bird’s own weird or supernatural experience with spiders into the narrative. Bird writes to Snow that she meets the “president of spiders,” a talkative spider who “speaks for the spiders” (220). Further, spiders, for a young black girl who has witnessed her sister’s privilege, embody something

AfroSurreal and magical real 43 greater than the imaginary; the spiders reveal life’s real complexities. Boy has sent Snow, Bird’s sister away, in an attempt to shield Bird from growing up as a witness to her sister’s privilege. Bird grows up feeling the loss of her sister, and while Bird’s strange meeting with the president of spiders could be the result of a lonely young girl’s overactive imagination, readers could also interpret Bird’s meeting as an actual event. For Lacan, any “behavior” that does not actively work towards survival belongs to the realm of the imaginary (13). Bird’s spider meeting does not center on her procuring food or shelter, and could possibly be considered a product of her imagination, but I argue that the spider meeting, imagined or otherwise, provides insight into Bird’s relationship with the black community, a community that shapes her present-day development. Rather than being locked in the past, folktales allow Bird to survive in the now. Cedric Robinson has described “Marxism as the dominant form that the critique of capitalism has assumed in Western thought” (10) and argues that Western philosophy, from “Hegel’s dialectic of Aufhebung, Marx’s dialectic of class struggle” to “Darwin’s evolution of the species are all forged from the same metaphysical conventions” (Robinson 19). The language of boy snow bird represents a break with this way of thinking, as the realistic moments in the story seem stranger than the fantastic ones and make it difficult to accept linear time. Oyeyemi interrupts her “Once upon a time” fairytale-like structure (with an “evil queen” who sends her daughter away) with references to real-life historical events, including Emmett Till’s murder (273–274) and Muhammad Ali’s stance on the Vietnam War (179). The cruelty towards Till and the anger directed at Ali for his stance seems less real than talking spiders, a father whose occupation recalls the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and mirrors that produce no reflections. Rachel Tudor asserts, “It is important to distinguish magical realism and the contemporary Native American novel because they are different species.” Both magical realism and AfroSurrealism offer a way of interpreting the world that differs from strict realism, but magical realism is based on the idea that strange, unnatural things in a fictional world actually happened, while AfroSurrealism creates moments of hesitation, as the strange or weird event could have actually happened or could be the result of the protagonist’s mental state. Alejo Carpenter was unable, argues Kim Sasser, to allow others to “distinguish lo real maravilloso from the Surrealists” despite his attempts (266), but distinguishing between the realities of the mind and physical realities, no matter how strange, is central to understanding AfroSurrealism. AfroSurrealism, magical realism, and Surrealism are indeed closely connected, but Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird reveals key differences. Taking its cues from African cosmology, AfroSurrealism recognizes the spiritual and the scientific do more than coexist, they merge. Robin D.G. Kelley argues that the “marvelous existed in the lives of blacks and nonWestern peoples—before Breton, before Rimbaud, before Lautreamont” (185). Kelley’s argument reminds us that non-Western peoples have long

44 AfroSurreal and magical real enveloped surreal elements into their worldviews. Further, Caribbean Surrealists, such as Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, saw Surrealism not so much as an aesthetic movement than as methodology, a way of generating the “powerful unconscious forces” that led to a freer mind and personal and communal freedom (Kelley 169–170). While black Surrealists have been in conversation with other artists and participants in the avant-garde, AfroSurrealism possesses its own ideologies and culturally specific worldviews. As cultural scholar Mike Sell points out, “[T]he struggle against Eurocentricism cannot be fully addressed in the conventional vocabulary, syntax, and logic of the European radical tradition” (74). Bird’s retelling of a folktale about a house slave named La Belle Capuchine and High John the Conqueror shows the value of self-knowledge. In Bird’s story, when the handsome High John the Conqueror appears at the plantation to set the slaves free, he “cannot tell the difference” between La Belle Capuchine, the “dainty” house slave who treats the other slaves poorly, and her mistress (224). Bird’s tale amuses the spiders and unites them with people; it reveals Bird’s insecurities about her beautiful sister as it also suggests her connections to her community. Ahad reveals that “sickness stems from the social order, not the individual subject” (97). If the Bird’s supernatural experiences are a result of a racist, diseased society, then her insertion of the African-American folktale demonstrates her attempts to disrupt the social order and Eurocentric narratives about beauty and femininity. Race and class inform language and voice, and the racial and class dimensions of boy snow bird should not be dismissed; both are significant. While Leon Trotsky writes that “Marxism does not maintain at all that ethnographic traits have an independent character,” I argue that the psychologically painful experiences of formerly enslaved people created unique and resilient forms of language and art. In this chapter, I have argued for AfroSurrealism as having an “independent character,” one we should not ignore. These AfroSurreal texts develop their own theories, philosophies, and counternarratives. AfroSurrealism seems to be in conversation with Surrealism, but it has developed its own traditions, which stand apart from Bürger’s notion of the avant-garde. And while it is true that some black artists achieve mainstream recognition and has in some ways been absorbed by white institutions and establishments, blackness creates an oppositional tension that has never been fully subsumed by white culture. If the “historical development of society” can only be understood by its “frequently contrariant evolutions,” then perhaps we can see blackness as part of those “contrariant evolutions” (Bürger 72). Conclusion We should view Oyeyemi’s and Johnson’s novels as part of a natural outgrowth of AfroSurrealists’ interest in psychology and the unconscious. Oyeyemi and Johnson’s explicit discussions of psychology offer one way

AfroSurreal and magical real 45 of distinguishing AfroSurrealism from magical realism. Still, AfroSurrealism’s examination of race offers yet another. Racism, as W.E.B. DuBois has noted in The Souls of Black Folks, is itself a surreal and psychologically devastating experience (our responses to individuals’ public identities are mediated by a social construction), and many texts by writers of color contain surrealist elements. But unlike other genres, such as realism (the protest novel, the autobiography) or naturalism, that have been adopted by the black literary canon, the AfroSurreal texts reference phenomena—ghosts, spirits, monsters, time travel—are not found in ontological reality. Pym and boy snow bird offer a psychological explanation for their supernatural elements—Johnson’s magical landscapes and Oyeyemi’s vampire-like mixed-race women—as they explore the trauma of racial oppression. AfroSurreal fiction, as a branch of black speculative fiction particularly interested in how the mind works, investigates the anxieties haunting texts, the various ways our dreams, fantasies, and fears interface with the “real” world. Oyeyemi’s and Johnson’s novels provide clear examples of how the supernatural can represent anxieties embedded in the subconscious. Notes 1 In a discussion of the website UNDINA, created by Kostoya Mitenev, and Bodies@ INCorporated website developed by Victoria Vesna and collaborators at the University of California at Santa Barbara, González argues for racially hybrid bodies assembled in online spaces. 2 Wolin argues Heidegger views man’s dominion over a world and historical knowledge as defining aspects of humanity (xxiii). 3 This argument—that black aesthetics can disrupt temporality—has been made by several scholars, primarily about black music. One of the most remarkable is Alexander Weheliye’s “Feenin’; Post Human Voices in Contemporary Black Music”. Social Text. Vol. 20, No. 2, 2002, pp. 21–47. 4 In “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks describes the “black oppositional gaze” as offering not only a critique but also a protection from “violence perpetuated and advocated by discourses of mass media.” 5 John Wilcox suggests that the first recorded use of the phrase “l’art pour l’art” was in Benjamin Constant’s diary, and was a result of a series of misreadings of Kant (361–363). Wilcox, John. “The Beginnings of L’Art Pour L’Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Vol. 11, No. 4, 1953, pp. 360–377. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/426457. 6 In a 1988 Présence Africaine interview with Christina Davis, Toni Morrison rejects the term “magical realism,” describing it as inadequate for the “other knowledge or perception” of many black people she knew. 7 Hurston is described in Black, Brown, and Beige as part of the “Surrealist Beginnings of the United States.” 8 Garuba cites poet Osundare as an example of how “[r]ather than a contradiction between the secular vision of Marxism and the metaphysical nature of the animist inheritence, Osundare’s poetry can be seen as an example of how both can be creatively deployed.”

46 AfroSurreal and magical real Works cited Ades, Dawn and Michael Richardson with Krzysztof Fijalkowski. The Surrealism Reader. Tate Publishing, 2015. Adjaye, Joseph K, editor. “Time and Culture among the People of Mali.” Time in the Black Experience. Greenwood Press, 1994. Ahad, Badia Sahar. Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture. University of Illinois Press, 2010. Anderson, Reynaldo and Charles E. Jones. “Introduction.” Afrofuturism 2.0, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 9–20. Barth, John. “Lost in the Funhouse.” www.personal.colby.edu/~isadoff/ss/barth.doc. Bronner, Simon J. “The Americanization of the Brothers Grimm.” Following Tradition. University Press of Colorado, 1998. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46nqtf. Brown, Cecil. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” Massachusetts Review. Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn/Winter 1995, pp. 455–473. www.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db= aph&AN=9511074267&site=ehost-live. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minnesota Press, 1982. Carpentier, Alejo. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 89–108. www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/fileadmin/43030300/ Heise-Materialien/carpentier-baroque.pdf. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations. Vol. 37, 1992, pp. 1–26. Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue canadienne de littérature comparée. Vol. 30, No. 2, 2011, pp. 429–443. Chen, Jun Mian. “The Contentious Field of Whiteness Studies.” Journal for Social Thought. Vol. 2, No. 1, December 2017. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca.index.php. Cobb, Jelani William. The Substance of Hope. Walker and Co., 2010. Davis, Christina. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” Présence Africaine. Vol. 145, 1988, pp. 141–150. Edmondson, Laura. “Confessions of a Failed Theatre Activist: Intercultural Encounters in Uganda and Rwanda.” Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange, edited by Mike Sell. Palgrave, 2011, pp. 41–59. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Harvard University Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central. http://ebookcentral. proquest.com/lib/ku/detail.action?docID=3300691. Edwards, Gary and John Mason. Black Gods: Orisa Studies in the New World. Yoruba Theological Archministry, 1985. Ellis, Trey. “The New Black Aesthetic.” Callaloo. Vol. 38, Winter 1989, pp. 233–243. Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations in Afro-Futurism.” The New Centennial Review. Vol. 3, No. 2, 2003, pp. 287–302. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/380. Flores, Angel. “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” Hispania. Vol. 38, No. 2, 1955, pp. 187–192. www.jstor.org/stable/335812. Garuba, Harry. “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.” Public Culture. Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003, pp. 261–285. www. muse.jhu.edu/article/42967.

AfroSurreal and magical real 47 Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Harvard University Press, 1993. Ginway, Elizabeth M. “Surrealist Benjamin Peret and Brazilian Modernism.” Hispania. Vol. 75, No. 3, 1992, pp. 543–553. González, Jennifer A. “The Appended Subject.” Race in Cyberspace, edited by Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman. Routledge, 2000, pp. 27–50. Griffiths, Jennifer L. Traumatic Possessions. University of Virginia Press, 2009. Henderson, Mae. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics and Dialectics and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” Changing Our Own Words, edited by Cheryl Wall. Rutgers University Press, 1989. www.sfonlinebarnard.edu. Johnson, Mat. Pym: A Novel. Spiegel & Grau, 2011. Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon, 2003. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982. Krogstad, Jens Manuel. “Social Media Preferences Vary by Race and Ethnicity.” Pew Center for Research, 2015. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/03/social-media-preferencesvary-by-race-and-ethnicity/. Lacan, Jacques. “The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real.” On the Names-of-the-Father. Trans. Bruce Fink. Polity Press, 2013, pp. 1–53. Mahasha, Phetogo Tshepo. “African Renaissance, How the Prefix ‘Afro’ May Arrest Imagination & Manifesto Salesmanship.” Shadow and Act: On Cinema of the African Diaspora. Indiewire. https:// shadowandact.com/african-renaissance-how-the-prefix-afro-may-arrest-imagination-manifestosalesmanship/. Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf. Neal, Larry. “Any Day Now: Black Art and Liberation.” Ebony. Vol. 24, No. 10, 1969, pp. 54. Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Sphere. Foreword by Miriam Hansen. Trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Njoroge, Njoroge A. Chocolate Surrealism: Movement, Memory, and History in the CircumCaribbean. University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe. “Insider and Outsider, Black and American. Rethinking Hurston’s Caribbean Ethnography.” Radical History Review. Vol. 87, 2003, pp. 49–70. Oyeyemi, Helen. Boy, Snow, Bird. Riverhead, 2014. Phillips, Rasheedah. Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice. Vol. 1. The Afrofuturist Affair, 2015. Ramirez, Catherine. “Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin.” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies. Vol. 33, No. 1, 2008, pp. 185–194. Redmond, Eugene. “Introduction: The Ancient and Recent Voices within Henry Dumas.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 22, No. 2, Henry Dumas Issue, Summer 1988, pp. 143–154. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina, 2000. Roger, Mitchell. “Neo-Primitivism.” Minnesota Review. Vol. 1, No. 6, Spring 1976, pp. 144–147. Sasser, Kim. “Magically Strategized Belonging: Magical Realism as Cosmopolitan Mapping in Ben Okri, Cristina García, and Salman Rushdie.” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2011. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. “Foreword.” Theory of the Avant-Garde, edited by Peter Burger. University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. vii–xlvii. Sell, Mike. The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War. Seagull, 2012.

48 AfroSurreal and magical real Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2011. Spillers, Hortense. “The Idea of Black Culture.” The New Centennial Review. Vol. 6, No. 3, Winter 2006, pp. 7–28. Sundquist, Eric. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. University of Georgia Press, 1992. Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. Oxford University Press, 1998. Thomas, Terry, “Afri-Cobra: A Black Revolutionary Arts Movement and Arts for People’s Sake.” ETD Collection for AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library. Paper 373, 2012. http:// digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1935&context=dissertations. Trotsky, Leon. “Literature and Revolution.” Marxist Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/ trotsky/1924/lit_revo/. Tudor, Rachel. “Latin American Magical Realism and the Native American Novel.” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice. Vol. 3, No. 4, 2010, pp. 1–14. Tythacott, Louise. Surrealism and the Exotic. Routledge, 2003. Van de Vate, Marleen Susanne. “Tense, Aspect and Modality in a Radical Creole: The Case of Saamáka.” PhD dissertation, University of Tromsø. 2011. Van Veen, Tobias. “Planetary Vibes, Digital Ciphers, and Hip Hop Sonic Remix.” Afrofuturism: 2.0 The Rise of Astro-Blackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, e-book. Lexington Books, 2016. von Franz, Marie-Louise. Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Spring Publications, 1978. Watson, Veronica T. The Souls of White Folk. University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Widdifield, Hannah. “Myth y la magia: Magical Realism and the Modernism of Latin America.” Master’s Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2015. https://trace.tennesse.edu/utk_ gradthes/3421. Wolin, Richard. The Politics of Being. Columbia University Press, 2016. Žižek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, 1997.

2

Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas, and the AfroSurreal grotesque

Odd or weird events occur throughout the AfroSurreal novel, but moments of racial trauma are presented as even more bizarre than supernatural occurrences. In “Keepin’ It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous,” Robin D.G. Kelley notes the humor in the blues, “the fragile and strange world of white supremacy” (165). A similar tension, the “traumatic marvelous,” infuses the work of the AfroSurreal text and marks it as different from other forms of speculative fiction, including fantasy and science fiction, in which the boundaries between the fantastical world and reality are more clearly delineated. Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light and Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas demonstrate the AfroSurreal novel’s tendency to allow supernatural events to reveal race and class oppression as strange and monstrous, while juxtaposing the horrors in people’s lives with love and beauty. Danticat and Abani demonstrate an interest in social justice through their use of the grotesque, which infuses their texts with distinctive portrayals of black life—depictions that show black people as imperfect, three-dimensional, and complex. At the same time, Claire and The Secret History complicate ideas of power: these texts present poor or working-class blacks as survivors of a racial oppression characterized by strangeness and ambiguity. Because the realities of racism conflict with the socially constructed phenomenon of race, black people must develop specific strategies for maintaining psychological resiliency. Black people’s recognition of the traumatic marvelous is also a realization of absurdity and the bizarre infrastructures underlying racial oppression. The grotesque thus becomes one of AfroSurreal texts’ primary modes for investigating the psychological tension generated by racial oppression and for understanding blacks’ methodologies for maneuvering through potentially traumatic epistemologies associated with racism. AfroSurrealism, by recognizing the fearsome qualities of racism while sometimes mocking the absurdity of race, reveals how the grotesque can serve as a means of apprehending, interpreting, and interacting within the world. Wolfgang Kayser’s theory of the grotesque suggests that the grotesque can provide a basis for revolutionary acts. “The grotesque,” Kayser explains, “instills fear of life rather than death” (185). The grotesque forces people to question the preeminence of life: if one recognizes the disharmony, tensions, and terrors within life, then one grows less afraid of death and may risk

50 AfroSurreal grotesque one’s own life for a cause or one’s community. Yet the grotesque not only creates uncertainty about life and life’s purpose, it also creates new tensions. Literary scholar Pimentel Biscaia finds “political potential” in the grotesque and argues that the grotesque exists in “resistance to established rules and norms” (10–30), becoming capable of disrupting colonial thought. Mikhail Bakhtin locates the grotesque in the carnival, which “marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (15). Ato Quayson’s work on Animist Realism suggests that a grotesque “interweaving of esoteric and reality passages” (173) can restructure society and create enchantment “in a world that appears to be singularly disenchanted” (175). Lorna Burns, a UK-based scholar of Caribbean literature, has explored Alejo Carpentier’s position that “everything that eludes established norms is marvellous” (qtd. in Burns 56); if we consider Carpentier’s statement, then the grotesque, which functions in opposition to dominant cultural ideologies, permeates both magical realism and Surrealism. Some critics have argued that while the grotesque is capable of upsetting boundaries, social customs, and contemporary ways of thinking, it also functions as a means of social control. The Spirit of Carnival author David K. Danow locates the grotesque in Holocaust literature, in the “alien world … characterized by terror, hostility, and a loss of meaning” (39–40), and in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa. Danow traces the grotesque through these texts and finds it in their relentless exploration of life’s cruelty, which fail to offer, as Bakhtin describes it, “the opportunity to enter a completely new order of things” (34). Danow examines texts where horrific events have a specific cause. The characters within these texts attribute their harsh lives to World War II or an evil dictator, which provide evidence of clearly defined evil. But what does the grotesque mean for people who experience a racially oppressive system under a socially constructed phenomenon such as race? If one is born into an absurd world, one dominated by an absurdity that cannot be attributed to a tyrant (Adolf Hitler, Márquez’s General), then what strategies do people develop for resisting oppression and developing psychological resilience? In AfroSurreal texts, the grotesque offers psychological relief and provides a pathway for new ways of thinking about established systems. Edwidge Danticat’s fifth novel, Claire of the Sea Light, demonstrates Danticat’s masterful incorporation of the AfroSurreal grotesque. Danticat calls forth the horrific grotesque through the sublime—a rogue wave (Figure 2.1), a gigantic wave once considered a sailor’s myth—threatens to overtake the Haiti’s tiny Ville Rose village (58). Kayser posits that the “true depth of the grotesque is revealed only by its contradiction with its opposite, the sublime” (58). The “sublime” commonly refers to that which inspires awe, while the “grotesque” describes the lowly. Yet, as Kayser points out, an aesthetic understanding of the grotesque is “an attempt to invoice and subdue the demonic aspects of the world” (188). If the grotesque does indeed recognize and suppress evil, then Danticat’s fearsome wave fascinates and terrifies, but ultimately restores the community. Danticat endows the wave with

AfroSurreal grotesque 51

Figure 2.1 Alan Clark’s Water Goddess evokes the spirit of the rogue wave and the strange, sometimes grotesque, sometimes sublime memories of water found in the AfroSurreal text. Source: Alan Clark/Water Goddess (2013) appears courtesy Alan Clark, all rights reserved.

the superhuman power to “pummel” boats and “lick” the sky (3). The wave generates a thrilling tension, and ultimately, this psychological tension disrupts and then unites the community as “dozens of townspeople” mourn and rebuild together (29). In Claire, we see this pattern repeated: characters encounter the grotesque, undergo a crisis, develop connections to their communities, and ultimately, grow inspired to fight for the survival of that community. Lorna Burns cites the “reconciliation of opposites” and immanence as Surrealist principles (53), and in Danticat’s novel, we see opposites manifested in the characters’ encounters with both the grotesque and the sublime: the grotesque and a higher spirituality infuse their lives. The ocean wave is not the only figure anthropomorphized and made grotesque in Danticat’s first chapter. The first few pages also include a detailed

52 AfroSurreal grotesque description of the Ville Rose village, in which the alleys are described as bloodlike “capillaries” (5). Yet besides giving Ville Rose an animalistic characteristic, Danticat describes this fictional village, set near Port au Prince, Haiti, as plantlike, as having “a flower-shaped perimeter that, from the mountains, looked like the unfurling petals of a massive tropical rose” (5). Even more notably, Ville Rose’s beauty is situated within the context of enormous poverty. Ville Rose, Danticat writes, “was home to about eleven thousand people, five percent of them wealthy or comfortable. The rest were poor, some dirt-poor” (5). With the next chapter, Chapter 2, Danticat juxtaposes the “massive” and fearsome rose with a grotesque image—that of Ville Rose’s exploding frogs (41). In “The Frogs,” Danticat describes how “dozens of frogs exploded,” presumably due to, as a herpetologist who visits the island explains, “a fungal disease caused by the hotter than usual weather” (54). Although Danticat offers a scientific explanation for the frogs’ death, this weird event still has a touch of mystery to it. Gaëlle, the central character in this chapter or story, compares, unfavorably, the death of the frogs from heat to frogs who die from a “naturalseeming” death (43) while Laurent, Gaëlle’s husband, claims he has “never heard of creatures dying like this” (45). These grotesque deaths serve a specific purpose: the frogs become a psychological mirror of the characters’ emotional pain. The strangeness of these frogs’ strange deaths is juxtaposed with the grotesqueness of the death of Gaëlle’s daughter, Rose. The frogs also foreshadow Gaëlle’s pain and the randomness and surreal aspects of life. Rose’s birth is a medical mystery; when a sonogram reveals that a cyst grows “in her chest and down her entire spine,” Gaëlle’s gynecologist believes Rose “would not live even an hour, much less a day” (56). Throughout the chapter, Gaëlle is haunted by dreams of “frog carcasses slithering into her mouth and down her throat,” and it isn’t until she swallows a baby frog that she is able to give birth to Rose, who is born perfectly healthy. Just as the wave and the rose-shaped town reveal the mental state of the characters, the freak occurrences that happen in their lives, the dying frogs are symptomatic of the characters’ psychological feelings. Swallowing the frog symbolizes how Gaëlle must learn to swallow her pain, for while Rose dies in a freak accident a few years after her birth, Gaëlle’s husband is murdered on the very night of Rose’s birth. Thus, the novel’s strange events do not form a “made-up” story, so much as one that reflects mental and interior processes and the characters’ attempts to cope with pain. Danticat helps us to realize that great beauty can occur in places of great tragedy. Danticat reveals Ville Rose as inharmonious, grotesque, as a town suffused with both poverty and a disquieting radiance. What does Danticat’s investigation of the grotesque reveal about psychological resilience? The descendants of former slaves and the inhabitants of a country exploited by white imperialists, the residents of Ville Rose lead extremely challenging lives. Through Danticat’s startling description of, first, Ville Rose’s ocean wave and, then, the town, readers are flung into a psychological space where they must begin to reconcile physical beauty with oppression, the strange and surreal with a reality filled with hardships.

AfroSurreal grotesque 53 This amalgamation of beauty and hardship, love and loss, reveals the characters’ complex psychological states. A father, Nozias, must give away his daughter, Claire, because he can no longer care for her. Another character, Gaëlle, experiences multiple acts of violence when her daughter dies in a freak accident and her husband is murdered. Danticat ties neighborhood gang violence to poverty and poverty to a racial oppression that began when Haiti was “a gift for Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline” (47). Danticat’s use of the grotesque creates a greater awareness of suffering not as a unified entity, but as fractured and multilayered. As with African magical realism, AfroSurrealism acknowledges “an esoteric universe beyond that of … mundane existence” (Quayson 166). For Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans, this kind of spiritual knowledge complicates life’s hardships, by suggesting meaning in the midst of trauma. Literary critic Wendy Faris argues that magical realism represents the experiences of the postcolonial subject, who lives in “suspension” between two or more cultures and worldviews (103). I argue this could also be true for the grotesque. The grotesque suggests the ways blackness lays suspended between the myths and imaginaries associated with racial oppression and poverty. In Claire, Gaëlle counsels Claire, whose mother died shortly after her birth, by telling Claire how much her mother wanted her: “I don’t go to church every Sunday. I don’t go to church at all. But I know she pulled you out of God’s hands” (161–162). Gaëlle’s words reveal that although she is one of the least religious members of Ville Rose, she has received a sublime spiritual knowledge, an understanding of “God’s hands,” that allows her to survive the death of her own child and her husband’s murder, a death precipitated by Haiti’s poverty and debt, which began when France received compensation for the loss of its slaves. The AfroSurreal novel’s exploration of the grotesque is rooted in the African diaspora’s storytelling traditions. For example, in the slave narrative The Life of William Grimes, Grimes’ details about the grotesque—Frankie, a witch and house slave, haunts him—reveal the terrors of slavery. Similarly, in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, a folktale about poor black sharecroppers meeting the devil emphasizes sharecroppers’ hardships and need for money. The AfroSurreal grotesque, both past and present, recognizes the “abysmal forces” that underlie our world (Kayser 37). In AfroSurreal texts, characters encounter the grotesque, undergoing a crisis, and subsequently attempt to regain balance by forging connections to their community. Danticat and Abani’s novels showcase people falling in love with strange, grotesque “monsters.” These monsters exist as either human beings whose looks or actions position them outside the mainstream, or as technological transmissions of the human voice and human thought. Kayser has written that when the “mechanical object is alienated by being brought to life,” then we have encountered a form of the grotesque (183). In Claire and Secret History, people fall in love not only with monstrous human beings, but also with modern technology that both abuses and empowers people.

54 AfroSurreal grotesque Many texts about the black experience focus on autobiography and realism, so the grotesque may seem an unusual choice for examining racial discrimination. Yet, as June Jordan argues, black readers have been incorrectly told that there is “only one kind of writing‒protest writing‒and that only one kind of protest writing deserves our support and study” (86–87). Jordan’s words reveal the need for a variety of creative texts to investigate the complexity of black life. In recent AfroSurreal novels, the grotesque provides a means for writing about the psychological complexity of contemporary racism, which may exist even in digital forums, in the absence of a racialized body. The grotesque, which exploits the ruptures and disunity located within society’s established values and institutions, allows for conversations about monstrosity, unconventionality, and absurdity. While other forms of literature rely on the grotesque and have engaged similar questions, AfroSurrealism exaggerates the grotesque in order to reveal the contradictory nature of racism. Claire and The Secret History emphasize the grotesque, and by doing so, reveal new truths about the strange and complex nature of racial oppression. Claire explores the grotesque through the monster, the person who is a combination of man and machine, and the sense of both awe and disturbance this synthesis creates. Movements involving people of color—AfroSurrealism, Afrofuturism, and Astrofuturism—reveal an awareness of the historical abuses of science, including the Tuskegee Experiment and Henrietta Lacks’ cells. However, they also appear more optimistic about technology’s ability to decentralize power than are mainstream intellectual movements. Futurist Madeline Ashby suggests mainstream futurism has been viewed as “white and male” as “the future has [traditionally] belonged to people who have not had to struggle” (qtd. in Eveleth). Ashby’s assertion that mainstream futurism has been predominantly a white, male field is echoed by futurist Alida Draudt. Still, in a 2017 article for Slate, Draudt indicates that by “incorporating a variety of different perspectives—particularly of women and minorities—the process of working toward possible futures might look a bit different.” I hypothesize that Draudt’s idea could possibly be true: women of color, “white” women, and people of color may provide different imaginings of the future, as there may be less reverence for some traditions, especially if these traditions are rooted in racist or sexist ideologies. From Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategies, which incorporated concepts from Octavia Butler’s novels to Rasheedah Phillips’ The Afrofuturist Affair, which organizes within the Philadelphia community, and Reynaldo Anderson’s and Lonny Brooks’ Black Speculative Arts Movement conference, several scholars and artists of color conceive of the Afrofuturist movement as offering opportunities to dismantle and interrogate racism, classism, and sexism, and develop new strategies for challenging oppression. Members of the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit organization devoted to “foresight into the critical new insights that ultimately lead to action,” are working to dispel mythologies, empower communities, and explore ways to resist hegemonic structures and ideologies.

AfroSurreal grotesque 55 Afrofuturism acknowledges black woman science fiction writer Octavia Butler and black woman scholar Alondra Nelson as two of the most important names in its history. Afrofuturist scholar Sandra Govan argues that Octavia Butler’s novels argue for social transformation, through heroines who embody a “physical, psychic, or attitudinal difference” that allows for “a greater faculty for constructive change” (84). Afrofuturist creative and academic texts have resulted in a range of teach-ins, community gatherings, and social justice projects. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, for instance, sees hope in exploring space as a new frontier and argues that Astrofuturism represents “the desire to … find some space beyond the reach of old powers and obsolete identities” (11). Complicating matters even further is how many Afrofuturist and AfroSurreal texts challenge the mainstream as to what, exactly, constitutes technological advancement. The work of Afrofuturist Reynaldo Anderson suggests that because black people have a nonlinear perception of time and that because blacks have always created their own technologies, European concepts of modernity can conflict with Africans’ own ideas about progress and advancement (36). Danticat’s text allows the grotesque to reveal and examine these tensions. One of the novel’s major monsters, Tiye, the brutal leader of a neighborhood gang, has a prosthetic arm; still, in this novel of multiple, interlocking stories, a central character—Louise George, the host of a popular radio show— manipulates technology in service of community healing and repair. Because Louise uses her voice to transmit human anguish and triumph, Louise is in essence a cyborg, “the monster of the twenty-first century” capable of generating both fear and pleasure (Orviz). Louise is an example of what Donna Haraway describes as “how twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial … and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” (11). Louise’s conversations thus demonstrate the uncanny quality of a humanity amplified through technology. Danticat uses the grotesque to reveal technology’s inherent contradictions. On the one hand, technology can create or intensify fear. The technology Bernard encounters when he is falsely arrested for murder is nothing short of nightmarish: “the same flashing lightbulbs kept erupting and a video camera light pierced his eyes” (73). The impersonal technology Bernard is exposed to magnifies his terror, as it further strips him and his interlocutors of their humanity. While Danticat refuses to idealize technology, she also showcases technology’s ability to galvanize social justice movements and help suppressed voices be heard. In recent years, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has spread information about police brutality, and Claire suggests that technology may have a similar role in helping people fight other types of violence, including sexual assault. Technology is powerful and sometimes awe-inspiring, and we witness technology’s emancipatory effects throughout the novel: Flores, a character who is raped, becomes empowered from telling her story on Louise’s show; the people in

56 AfroSurreal grotesque the community are given a forum to describe horrific acts of violence; the poor gain attention and power by telling a compelling story. Danticat explains the link between the novel’s use of technology and social justice: When I started the book, I thought I was writing a book about the radio. I wanted to write a book in which each chapter was an episode of a radio show. That’s where the character of Louise George emerged. Even though she is not a central character, she has a very powerful presence, as does the radio, because she is using the radio as a means of giving people justice. Otherwise they would not get justice in certain types of situations. The radio is definitely a very important part of the story. Danticat’s AfroSurreal text reveals technology to be a way, not so much of eliminating poverty, but of demonstrating the power of people to share and transmit their own stories, in their own words. Danticat’s use of a written medium to explore radio’s power may seem an unusual choice: Danticat purposefully draws attention to the human voice, in a medium (writing) that relies nearly as much on the visual (typography) as pure sound. The radio talk show is an interactive medium—the caller and the radio host exchange ideas—and the “call-and-response” format, when coupled with the radio waves’ ability to reach enormous audiences, disrupts conventional ways of thinking about storytelling. Language, in the words of the tech industry, “iterates” as audience and host generate and reposition ideas. Readers are forced to think of language as a form of technology. Even though many chapters suggest the connections between the surreal imagination and modern, technological life (“Ghosts,” “Claire de Lune”), two chapters, “Starfish” and “Di Mwen, Tell Me,” explore ideas about technology most comprehensively. “Di Mwen, Tell Me” focuses on Max Senior’s near-comical attempts to avoid learning that his son is a rapist as Flores tells her story on Louise’s radio program: “But he refused to turn on the radio. He didn’t want to hear it. Besides, he had never cared for that mawkish program” (181–182). Max Senior turns off the radio and walks away from buildings broadcasting the program, and yet, try as he does, Max Senior simply can’t escape. The sounds penetrate his home and mind, and the violation, while nowhere near as great as Flores’, is clear: Max Senior is an unwilling participant in the development of a narrative he cannot control. Max is forced to confront the grotesque, the awesome power of a technology he fears and does not fully understand. Max Senior is one of the most powerful and respected men in his community, but in Danticat’s novel, technology is an equalizer, one that offers agency to Flores, a poor woman, who, as a result of Max Junior’s rape, would have previously been in a position of powerlessness and shame. While it is true that Flores feels discomfort at first, she ultimately experiences pleasure at being heard. By telling her story, Flores is able to share

AfroSurreal grotesque 57 a narrative of herself as a survivor, as someone who can travel freely, establish a business, and nurture herself and her child. Through Flores, we see technology in all of its power. Technology may be the modern-day manifestation of the sublime. Over and over again, in “Di Mwen, Tell Me,” readers recognize not only Max Senior’s desire to escape from technology (the maid in the house next door turned her radio to the loudest possible volume so that the entire neighborhood could hear), but also the investment this usually powerful man has in preventing information from being shared. Sentences such as “his name was being called out nearly as often as his son’s” (182) and “[h]e had known none of the details until now, hearing what she was telling the world through the radio” (185) reveal Max Senior’s discomfort with—and awareness of—media’s power. We recognize, of course, that the whole world cannot possibly be tuned in to this one radio station, one which is not even broadcast in all of Haiti. But by emphasizing technology’s ability to inform, Danticat suggests the power of not just the radio, but another form of technology: the Internet. In this chapter, Danticat examines the implications of a technology that can instantly inform the world of crimes, such as rape, that were once considered private and shameful. Readers can better understand a character such as Flores and the extent of technology’s ability to shine light on previously suppressed narratives. The radio serves as a reflection of modern technology and its occasionally awe-inducing power. Technology can incite fear because of its ability to perform godlike functions, such as instantaneously sharing one woman’s message of pain and survival with hundreds of people. Claire of the Sea Light’s juxtaposition of reality, folklore, and myth can be found in Max Junior’s possible hallucination or in the temporary disappearance of the young protagonist (although surrounded by people, Claire becomes momentarily “invisible” when she runs away from home). Still, the mythical space presents itself most acutely through the grotesque, particularly those of the unusual and independent-thinking Louise George. When Louise George coughs up blood during her periods (123), Danticat offers two explanations for this phenomenon, both of which seem plausible. The townspeople view Louise as cursed, but Max Senior realizes that Louise suffers from a rare condition associated with endometriosis. Thus, Max Senior, recognizing that Louise’s condition could be treatable with a certain type of lung surgery or hormone therapy, is unafraid of her and even “invite[s] her to read to the students at his school” (123). His appreciation of science, rather than folklore, allows him, at least initially, to interact with Louise with a gentleness that the rest of the townspeople seem to lack. AfroSurrealism tends to appreciate science, and in this scene, Danticat offers a scientific explanation for a strange phenomenon. Rather than serving as an affirmation of Enlightenment-based reason, AfroSurrealism juxtaposes emotion with reason and intuition. Max Senior’s complicated character—the foolish way he reacts to his son’s act of rape—makes it difficult to see him as a person who always acts in alignment with reason. The townspeople are,

58 AfroSurreal grotesque on the other hand, reasonable: they are intellectually curious and furious advocates for their children’s education. Danticat’s novel suggests that in the AfroSurreal text, reason is depicted as compassion towards others and the desire to discover and interact with the world. Encounters with the grotesque and with awe-inducing phenomenon prepare the AfroSurreal subject to accept multiple forms of reality. There is not a privileging among the different ways of knowing. Danticat’s text is AfroSurreal and grotesque in its discussion of not only the interplay of science/technology and folklore/myth, but also in its exploration of beauty and sound. Throughout Danticat’s novel, we see her intertwining beauty and horror; one does not exist without the other. We also see how repressed sounds—Creolized dialects—possess a certain kind of potency by revealing black language as a form compatible with modernism and new technology. It is this entangling of beauty and horror and paradise with the grotesque that marks Claire of the Sea Light as an AfroSurreal text. Although Danticat focuses on the fearsome aspects of the grotesque, Chris Abani examines its absurd qualities. Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas embodies the moral complexity of a detective novel, in which no character exists as pure evil or good. As a result of the threat of racialized violence, Abani’s black characters learn to see themselves as outsiders, yet the novel allows for ambiguity around what, exactly, constitutes “black.” Political theorist H.L.T. Quan has argued that “[a]t one time or another, Indigenous people, Aras, Mexicans, Muslims, Africans, single women, and LBGTQ people have been among the ‘other’” and “[appear] together as an entire cosmology, a fearsome Black planet” (176). The challenge of clearly defining blackness is revealed through Abani’s protagonist, Sunil Singh. Sunil hails from South Africa, lives in Las Vegas, and describes himself, “As black as I am, I am also Indian” (44). At times, he identifies solely with his blackness and describes himself as “the only black in the room”; at other times, he acknowledges only his Indian heritage (36). Sunil’s appearance is not tied to stereotypical physical characteristics associated with a particular race: Sunil’s hair is “kinky and thick” and “not quite an Afro, but close enough,” and we learn of his hair and near-black skin sentences before we discover his golden-flecked green eyes (29). Abani references Sunil’s ethnically ambiguous look in order to demonstrate the complexities of race. Neither Sunil nor the other characters are easily categorized; they possess hybrid cultural and racial identities. By describing the characters’ racial heritage and then blurring the boundaries between races, Abani questions and resists racial categorizations, based solely on physical appearance. “White Alice” is perhaps the character who best illustrates the ambiguity of race and its grotesque aspects. Living in Africa during the height of apartheid, White Alice appears to be an Indian or light-skinned black woman, but tells “anyone who would listen that she had been born white but had turned black after an illness” (219). No one believes that White Alice is truly white, first because of the darkness of her complexion, and second, because during

AfroSurreal grotesque 59 this era, it isn’t “unusual for people to try and pass as white” (219). Later, as a medical student, Sunil learns of one rare condition—Addison’s Disease, which can “darken the skin of white sufferers enough to alter perception of their racial heritage” (220)—that could support White Alice’s story, but throughout the novel, we remain unsure of her true racial or ethnic identity. Yet, even though White Alice’s whiteness is questionable, she destroys lives in an attempt to preserve that whiteness and privilege. Through White Alice, Abani invokes the grotesque’s spirit of carnival, its situating of “repugnance and fascination” within the same emotional space (Stallybrass and White 4–8). White Alice arouses multiple emotions and her idealization of a whiteness she may not possess marks her as absurd, grotesque, and tragic. We see this dramatized by how White Alice betrays Sunil’s mother and allows Sunil’s father, a fighter for the African National Congress, to be captured by the secret police. In exchange for being reclassified as “white” by the government, White Alice tricks Sunil into revealing the location of his father’s hiding place (89). Surprisingly, a woman of possibly black ancestry leads to the violent murder of Sunil’s father and several other freedom fighters who are fighting for black equality. While White Alice possesses an ambiguous racial background, so does Asia, Sunil’s girlfriend. Asia is a biracial woman whose surname—Kaczynski— references European ancestry, even as the name she chooses (she changes her name from “Egypt” to “Nile” before finally settling on Asia) indicates an African or Asian background (156). Asia’s name changes reveal both her willingness to reinvent herself and the potentially hazy boundaries of race. In The Secret History of Las Vegas, even the characters who appear racially unambiguous remain cultural hybrids. For instance, Sunil’s friend Sheila is a black woman who dresses “like a white soft-rock singer from the eighties” (45), which characterizes Sheila as absurd. Sheila, Sunil claims, reflects “an odd way for a black woman to dress” (41). Abani’s descriptions introduce a world where race itself is hard to define, even as racism has tangible, life-threatening consequences. Abani, by questioning the attributes (physical appearance, cultural connections) that people use to define race, presents the phenomenon as strange, arbitrary, and above all, AfroSurreal. Further, Abani refuses to associate “black” with evil and “white” with goodness and demonstrates how good and evil, black and white, coexist. Many people had been blinded to white privilege in the United States and South Africa, Abani suggests, not because of something inherently evil in dark skin, but because of an inability to associate whiteness with monstrosity: “It had been whiteness, a lightness that made it hard for the perpetrators to see the limits of their souls, not blackness, that destroyed them all” (218). Abani’s text opens doors for dialogue within communities of color about black political philosophies in both South Africa and America. AfroSurrealism often resists mainstream values and ways of thinking, yet, through conversation with Afrofuturism, Ethno-Surrealism, Indigenous Futurism, and other aesthetic movements, AfroSurrealism explores the ambiguous and complicated nature of racial oppression. I identify The Secret History of Las

60 AfroSurreal grotesque Vegas as a black anarchist text, as it advances “oppositional thinking” and questions the value of authority (Alston 6). The police, depicted in both South Africa and in the United States, through Sunil’s uneasy relationship with the police detective Salazar, are morally ambiguous and frequent sources of fear and intimidation. Abani’s text suggests the importance of questioning authority, particularly for people of color. Sunil’s constantly shifting relationships with race and power reveal these tensions. Sunil experiences destruction and race-based violence in apartheid South Africa, but in the United States, he must also confront his own complicity in violent clashes of race and class. These confrontations, foregrounded by his new romance with Asia, create psychological strain. As Sunil struggles to be a loving partner and decent human being, he feels responsible for his father’s death and for the painful human and animal tests conducted at the lab where he works. For Sunil, race, an ambiguous and abstract concept, has real-world consequences. When Sunil complains to Brewster, his supervisor, about the testing conducted on homeless men, Brewster’s reply serves to put Sunil “in his place.” Brewster tells Sunil that he is not doing too bad “for a black from the slums of Soweto” (268), and Sunil feels unsettled as a result. In the moments before he believes he will die, Sunil feels not fear but a “curious, empty detachment” for how his history has kept him from connecting with people (295). Sunil’s past—the race-based trauma he has undergone in South Africa—makes him question whether he still has empathy and whether he shares commonalities with the psychopaths he studies in his lab. He feels grotesque. Sunil’s feelings are underscored by his growing belief that Fire and Water, the conjoined twins accused of having committed murder, are being subjected to psychological tests based solely on how they look, which Brewster, and perhaps Sunil, consider grotesque. Fire and Water have been captured by the police and are being detained at Sunil’s lab and subjected to psychological testing even though, as Sunil says, they are “[o]dd, eccentric even, but not crazy” (267). Although when they are found at the murder scene, they have no blood on their bodies, “not even a trace” (25), but the police detective views them as suspicious and refers to them as “freaks” (16) and “freak show” (17). And while Fire and Water are later found to be part of the Downwinder Nation Action Group (316), a radical group that fights dangerous medical testing, it is Brewster, Sunil’s supervisor, who has been killing homeless people and conducting tests on them (262). But Brewster, who breathes “oxygen pumping from a portable tank,” looks fragile and innocent (47), while Fire and Water look strange, disturbing, grotesque. Fire is “little more than a head with two arms projecting out of Water’s chest. He had no legs or feet but he did have one toe and that was attached to Water’s torso” (14). Fire and Water are not monsters, but they are hated and feared, and for this reason, they best encapsulate Abani’s message about social justice: systematic oppression creates monsters.

AfroSurreal grotesque 61 Abani delineates the strange, sublime beauty in South Africa and Las Vegas in order to heighten the grotesque and extensive horror in the characters’ lives. Sunil remembers South Africa “with whites, blacks, Indians, and coloreds fading into burnt sepia—the color of tolerance, a smudge over the sharp, angled pain” (216). Similarly, Las Vegas’s lavish visual landscape—“the copper ingot of Mandalay Bay … the pyramid of Luxor … the Bellagio and the tip of the Eiffel Tower” (27)—reveals its attempts to escape the boundaries of geography and race. Abani suggests both places are home to the beautiful and sublime, the lawless and grotesque: “Vegas really is an African city,” Sunil says, of how Vegas mirrors both the glamor of a Cairo or Johannesburg and also the “seething poverty, the homelessness” (30). Still, Sunil, as much as he appreciates the blurred racial and geographic categories, and people’ attempts to transgress boundaries, also recognizes the danger of ignoring painful histories. Sunil who, at the novel’s beginning, “has become more American than I thought” with the belief “that he could somehow escape history” (24) decides, by the novel’s end, to make “amends with my past, my history” (218). South Africa and the United States function as literary characters and are geographic foils for each other; they are described as countries that attempt to situate themselves outside of history but find they cannot. Abani makes these comparisons clearest when he compares the ghettos of South African apartheid to Native American reservations: “Not unlike Native American reservations, homelands were corrals, ways to contain and further impoverish native populations” (27). Abani’s comparisons reveal why citizens of color distrust order and legality: the law has not protected them. Sunil experiences abjection when his moral universe is continuously turned upside down. As a scientist, he runs medical tests he does not believe in, including those on the homeless. But it is the race-based discrimination—the death of his father, the subsequent insanity of his mother, and Brewster’s manipulation and control, a control that reminds him of “the old guard of the apartheid” (51)—that reminds him that race is an arbitrary category that still controls his life. When Brewster claims he is pleased to be able to study Fire and Water because “[w]e’ve never had the chance to study the brain chemistry of a monster before” (50), Sunil recognizes that by conducting life-threatening tests on homeless people, he and Brewster are the monsters, the grotesque, despite Fire and Water’s unusual appearance. Abani’s text is more skeptical of science’s capacity for emancipation than is Danticat’s. Abani’s White Alice character symbolizes both the hegemonic quality South African apartheid and that of the United States’ Cold War era telecommunication system. In addition, Sunil’s laboratory clearly abuses its power. Yet an understanding of science allows for one of the novel’s greatest subversive acts. Fire, the man who ultimately destroys Brewster, does so through his cunning and his understanding of science. Fire is not a “grotesque” monster but a hero.

62 AfroSurreal grotesque At the end of the novel, Sunil discovers that Fire has only been pretending that his brain-dead brother is alive and that the two of them are conjoined. Fire’s charade allows him to gain access to the laboratory, discover its hidden passages, and examine the true extent of the unethical practices that have taken place there. Fire is like Rhinehart in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. He has been performing the identity of the monster, the outsider, just as all the other characters in the novel have been performing race. Race, a sometimes ill-defined concept, becomes, in Abani’s The Secret History, a factor that determines the characters’ destiny. Similarly, Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light reveals global race-based discrimination, the complexity of racial capitalism, and the improbability of separating one’s race from one’s class. Works cited Abani, Chris. The Secret History of Las Vegas. Penguin, 2014. Alston, Ashanti. “Black Anarchism.” A New World. www.revolutionarystrategicstudies.wordpress. com/2015/07/15/black-anarchism-a-talk-by-ashanti-alston/. Anderson, Reynaldo. “Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Art Movement: Notes on a Manifesto.” How We Get to Next. Medium. https://howwegettonext.com/afrofuturism2-0-and-the-blackspeculative-art-movement-notes-on-a-manifesto-f4e2ae6b3b4d/. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Introduction.” Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 1–58. Biscaia, Pimentel. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess. Lang, 2011. Burns, Lorna. “Uncovering the Marvellous: Surrealism and the Writings of Wilson Harris.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Vol. 47, No. 1, 2011, pp. 52–64. Danow, David. “The Carnivalesque-Grotesque.” The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque. UP of Kentucky, 1995. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130hmp5. Danticat, Edwidge. Claire of the Sea Light. Knopf, 2013. Draudt, Alida. “The Futurist Industry Is Overwhelmingly White and Male.” Slate. The Slate Group, 29 September 2017. https://slate.com/technology/2017/09/the-futurist-industry-isoverwhelmingly-white-and-male.html. Eveleth, Rose. “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists.” The Atlantic. 31 July 2015. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/380. Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 18, No. 2, 1984, pp. 82–87. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–181. Georgetown University. faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/ theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto.html. Jordan, June. Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster, 1981. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Indiana UP, 1963. Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon, 2003. Kilgore, De Witt. Astrofuturism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Orviz, Tocado Estefanía. “Cyborgs, the Monsters of the 21st Century.” Georgetown.edu. /blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-725-fall2013/2013/12/11/cyborgs-the-monstersofthe-21st-century/.

AfroSurreal grotesque 63 Quan, H.L.T. “It’s Hard to Stop Rebels Who Time Travel.” Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Lubin Alex. Verso, 2017. Quayson, Ato. “Magical Realism and the African Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, edited by Abiola Irele. E-book, Cambridge UP, 2009. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. “The Sewer, the Gaze, and the Contaminating Touch.” The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Cornell University Press, 1986, pp. 125–148. New York University Web Publishing. https://wp.nyu.edu/belowthegrid/wpcontent/uploads/sites/ 2545/2015/09/City-and-the-Sewer.pdf/.

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AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One

As I uncovered the singularly lush history of Black American cinema I grew empowered as an image maker. Christian Johnson, Black Aesthetic Collective Legend has it that Boots Riley’s acclaimed Sorry to Bother You—described in The Guardian and Slate as part of the “new” black Surrealism—appeared as a published script in the literary journal McSweeney’s, and the epigraphs from Johnson and Francis suggest why this Surreal or AfroSurreal text is so powerful. And if Sorry to Bother You is not only “surrealist” or “surreal” but also a form of satire, as the media-centered publications The Mary Sue and Film Inquiry argue, then the film’s humor and unexpected sounds and images free us (Figure 3.1). Riley, who is a rapper as well as filmmaker, explores the fluidity of AfroSurreal texts, their willingness to boldly combine written forms with film, music, or the visual arts while offering a critique of racial oppression and capitalism. Riley’s work offers but one example of how the visual, in particular, has resonance for the AfroSurreal text, which explores race as an imaginary, as socially constructed, but with real, and often violent, consequences for people of color. AfroSurreal texts, such as Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound, Deana Lawson’s Nation (2018), and Never Catch Me from Hiro Murai, the Flying Lotus, and Kendrick Lamar (in an interview with journalist Eric Ducker, Murai describes the video as embracing “the feeling of wavering between reality and supernatural”), reference history and spirituality, as they hesitate between realism and the dreams and anxieties that mark our psychological landscapes. Searching, transformative images and “a new language of hope and possibility” circulate throughout the AfroSurreal text (Rosemont and Kelley 322). In this chapter, I will discuss texts by two writers, Junot Díaz and Colson Whitehead, as demonstrating the qualities of contemporary black speculative writing and its exploration of cinematic language and devices. Both writers are interested in bricolage and the storytelling potential of film and visual media: In an interview with Diógenes Céspedes and Silvio Torres-Saillant, Díaz claims

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 65

Figure 3.1 From Sorry to Bother You Source: Still from Sorry to Bother You courtesy of Annapurna Pictures, LLC © 2018. All rights reserved.

to have been “influenced a lot by television and movies” and explains that his first writings were “screenplays” (902). Linda Selzer, a professor of African American literature, describes Whitehead’s previous work as a television critics and terms his work as “New Eclecticism” because of “Whitehead’s exhilarating culture, genre, and media-crossing art” (393). This discussion recognizes how Whitehead and Díaz employ cinematic references and cinematic devices (jump cuts, montages, dissolves) for specific purposes; this discussion also recognizes the shared similarities between various forms of black science fiction. Whitehead, who has written AfroSurreal (The Intuitionist) and Afrofantastic (John Henry Days) texts, explores futuristic technologies and Afrofuturism in Zone One. Díaz’s novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is offered as an example of AfroSurrealism, which falls under the umbrella of Afrofuturism 2.0, a term developed by Cultural studies scholar Reynaldo Anderson, as part of his “Black Speculative Arts Movement,” a movement indebted to the Black Arts Movement and its development of specific criteria for Black Aesthetics. AfroSurrealism has roots in the Black Aesthetic Movement. Amiri Baraka, one of the key figures in the Black Arts Movement, coined the term AfroSurreal Expressionism to describe the writings of Henry Dumas and other writers whose strange or surreal work still manages to be “organically connected” to what some may describe as the “real world,” teeters on the edge of folklore, myth, fable, history, and science, bridging all through dark humor, a dreamlike narrative, and an uncertain optimism about the future (Baraka 164). Dumas’ tragic death—Dumas was killed May 23, 1968, by a New York City Transit policeman during the “nationwide tumult that had followed the assassination of Martin Luther King seven weeks earlier”—may seem the last place for considering fiction that embodies these qualities (Wright ix). Yet Dumas’s work offers a sense of

66 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling hope through its exploration of “aesthetic uses of African and African American cosmologies and mythological systems” (Wright xiii). John S. Wright separates Dumas’s work from “the Euro-American surrealist orbit and from Latin American magical realism as well,” and locates it, instead, within the free and independent “Astro-Africanity” sphere associated with musician Sun Ra (xxix). This black-centered space provides opportunities for black artists to freely manipulate various cultural influences in a way that may have been difficult had these artists have been creating within a more Eurocentric space. Why are black-centered spaces and the visual important to even written AfroSurreal texts? Visual arts scholar Tiffany Barber has argued that both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement “fixed blackness—racial, corporeal, and aesthetic—as the very foundation of identity” (29–30). As Barber points out, these artists positioned blackness as a significant theoretical space. Existing within segregated communities and afforded fewer economic opportunities, the black artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement created uncompromising work; these movements provided artistic communities for exploring black intellectual and creative traditions. And because blackness has existed as a fluid signifier representing the phobias of white mainstream society, these black artists’ exploration of blackness was simultaneously an investigation of the psychology of class, sexuality, and gender. Contemporary AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist novels continue this inquiry into blackness and meld references to cinematic storytelling techniques, such as jump cuts and montages, with film allusions. While contemporary novels in other genres, such as slipstream, also include cinematic references, AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist novels question visual metaphors even while employing them. Black speculative fiction thus poses a provocative question: how much faith should people put in appearances, when visual markers of racial identity have helped to establish sites of oppression? 1968 was not only the year of Dumas’s murder, but also the formation of the visual arts collective that eventually became Afri-COBRA. Founded by Jeff Donaldson, the collective included Wadsworth Jarrell, Barbara Jones Hogu, Nelson Stevens, Carolyn Lawrence, James Phillips, and Jae Jarrell, Michael Harris, Frank Smith, Murry Depillars, Adger Cowans, Akili Ron Anderson, Napoleon Jones Henderson, and Kevin Cole. Afri-COBRA offered specifically defined criteria for black visual art, including “free symmetry,” bright colors known as Kool-Aid colors, and “mimesis at mid-point,” a “design which marks the spot where the real and the unreal … meet” (Jones Hogu). This attempt to define a black aesthetic allowed for communal conceptualizations of the future and spirituality. For instance, in an online interview with artist Carrie Mae Weems, Adger Cowans, a member of Afri-COBRA and Kamoinge, a black photography collective, argues the two Black Arts Movement-era groups were “defining their own destiny based on their own assessment of our people” (Weems). The WEUSI arts collective, formed in 1965, produced outdoor arts festivals, and created the Black Ball, a celebration of

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 67 Kwanzaa. Playthell Benjamin’s discussion of WEUSI member Ademola Olugebefola’s paintings further suggests the spiritual freedom black artists can achieve from developing their own aesthetic practices. Olugebefola’s paintings engage nonlinear timelines (allowing ancient and modern sounds and images to merge) in a way that could be described as AfroSurreal. Sun Ra’s music “embrace[d] … science and technology in ways that go beyond aesthetic form” (Kreiss 199). Dumas’s highly visual, often technologically centered, fictions embody these principles. Fred Moten’s description of Ellington’s music provides an apt description of artists, whom I would describe as AfroSurreal, in their ability to generate a “blackness submerged in the broken, breaking space-time of an improvisation” (29). Contemporary black speculative texts incorporate cinematic references to examine temporality and the racialized subject: Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao investigates the ways in which AfroSurrealism’s cinematic qualities can reimagine historic traumas while Whitehead’s Zone One offers a paradigm for the Afrofuturist novel and its incorporation of futuristic film references. Of the two movements, Afrofuturism and AfroSurrealism, Afrofuturism is better known. In the last ten years, Afrofuturism has blossomed into an aesthetic that responds to both mainstream science fiction and subsets of black speculative fiction through its Wikipedia page; popular exhibitions, including the Studio Museum of Harlem’s The Shadows took Shape curated by Thelma Golden, Naima J. Keith, and Zoe Whitley and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Unveiling Visions curated by John Jennings and Reynaldo Anderson; themed-books such as Ytasha Womack’s AfroFuturism and Jalada Africa’s Afrofuture(s); and recordings by musicians Janelle Monae, Erykah Badu, Tierra Whack, Childish Gambino, Solange, the Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, and SZA. Classes on Afrofuturism have been created and taught by a range of writers, artists, and scholars including speculative fiction writers Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, performance artist Coco Fusco, and Afrofuturist scholars Reynaldo Anderson, Nettrice Gaskins, Tobias C. van Veen, and Alexander G. Wehilye. The Dark Room Collective, the legendary artists’ collective founded by Sharan Strange, Janice Lowe, and Thomas Sayers Ellis, demonstrated a great respect for black speculative writing; their readers included Samuel R. Delany, one of the most acclaimed black science fiction writers; Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, whose work can be described as magical realist; and Jewelle Gomez, a pioneering and highly respected black speculative fiction writer. Members of the Collective have gone on to publish influential texts of examining AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist ideas: John Keene has written an AfroSurreal text, Counternarratives; Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars could be viewed as a collection of Afrofuturist poetry. Sharan Strange’s poetry, including her commissioned poem for #SingHerName, the Sandra Bland concert commemorating black women who have been brutalized by the police, forced diverse audience to consider ongoing racial oppression.

68 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling Strange’s activism, when combined with her comfort with technology—she served as the adviser for L-I-N-K-E-D, an online journal—suggests an awareness of Afrofuturist principles. Strange’s co-founders demonstrate a similar interest in innovative and socially aware black art. Poet Chris Stroffolino has argued that Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “recontextualizing” of three rejection letters creates a hybrid text that challenges the “white poetic establishment” (56–62). Ellis’s work, I argue, could also be described as AfroSurreal in the way it recombines and rethinks linear temporality. Similarly, Janice Lowe’s poems, which are often performed with live music and drums, examine black politics and aesthetics in the spirit of AfroSurreal poet Jayne Cortez. John Keene, to whom science fiction writer Samuel Delany dedicated his Atlantis: Model 1924, remembers the Collective’s underlying political focus and notes the Dark Room Collective’s literary heroes were Black Arts Movement artists. The work of co-founders Strange, Ellis, and Lowe demonstrates a cognizance of Afrofuturist or AfroSurreal perspectives. As one of the bedrocks of today’s Black Speculative Arts Movement, the Dark Room merged an interest in Black Arts Movement politics with a passion for visual technologies: photography and film. Filmmaker and Dark Room Collective’s member Patrick Sylvain,1 often who filmed the Dark Room’s readings as well as the activities of Boston’s Haitian community, notes the rarity of a young black adult owning a video camera in the 1980s. Visual images and social justice have inspired not only the Dark Room Collective but other Afrofuturist and AfroSurreal-related black arts collectives: Oakland’s Black Aesthetic has created its own film series curated by Ryanaustin Dennis and co-curated by Christian Johnson and Leila Weefur, which examines historical black films, and several organizations—Vernon Keeve’s Association of Black and Brown Writers, Michael James and Hally BellahGuther’s AfroComic Con, and the AfroSurreal Writers—interested in both historical and contemporary black visual culture. Perhaps this flurry of activity isn’t surprising; after all, Oakland is home to the Black Panthers and the AfroSurreal Manifesto, and, as artist/activist Nia King notes, several “legendary queer and trans Black and Brown spaces” (xxiii). Philadelphia’s Black Quantum Futurists, founded by writer and activist Rasheedah Phillips and musician Camae Ayewa, has produced film series and an exhibition on time travel machines; in Chicago, Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble is a music collective that has produced AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist videos; and Anaïs Duplan’s Center for Afrofuturist Studies invites artists to “reimagine new futures,” which they often do through visual technologies. Although the Center for Afrofuturist Studies is located in Iowa City and the Afrofuturist Collective is based in Philadelphia, many artists and collectives are located in Chicago, home to Krista Franklin, Cauleen Smith, and Nick Cave, who have, at different points in their careers, created Afrofuturist or AfroSurreal art; and to Chicago Surrealists founders Penelope Rosemont and Franklin Rosemont. Harlem, New York, is birthplace to not only the Harlem Renaissance, but also

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 69 the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which have both produced acclaimed exhibitions on Afrofuturism. These artists and collectives seem aware of the past and tend to view black art as a cathartic force, one bristling with history. These artists and collectives view historical knowledge as a way of developing resistance and strength. AfroSurrealism and Afrofuturism’s history of exhibitions and showcases, of live performances and gatherings, has forced AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist novels to reckon with both allusions to film and with film language (i.e., incorporating cinematic strategies, such as jump cuts and montages, into a narrative’s structure) into their texts. Both film allusions and film language enhance the strangeness of the written narrative: they serve as reminders that we, as readers, have entered a foreign and unfamiliar world. These strange worlds offer opportunities for investigating racial oppression; however, AfroSurrealism and Afrofuturism provide different methodologies for gaining power and agency. Analyzing these two movements’ differences and similarities—particularly their use of cinematic storytelling techniques— thus allows for more nuanced conversations about oppressed people’s relationships with power, labor, and technology. Cultural Studies scholar Mark Dery argues that Afrofuturist texts, rather than regarding blacks as a people in opposition to progress, position black people at the center of technology-centered conversations (Dery 180). This awareness of black people as unacknowledged technological creators is juxtaposed with the historical realities of the employment of technologies used to demean and harm people of color (eugenics, the Tuskegee experiment, the cells of Henrietta Lacks)—underlies Afrofuturism’s dystopian landscape. Afrofuturism suggests that the past will repeat itself unless black people gain some control over futuristic technologies, and consequently, Afrofuturistic texts feature black protagonists wielding power through advanced technologies. In other words, the Afrofuturistic text “aim[s] to reintegrate people of color into the discussion of cyberculture, modern science technology, and sci-fi pop culture” (Womack 17). Afrofuturism, then, like AfroSurrealism, delves into the fantastic in order to better understand black creativity and genius; however, AfroSurrealism attempts to reconcile the past with the present, while Afrofuturism explores the importance of black creators of futuristic technologies. Afrofuturism’s legacy lies in the way it rips apart the idea of a unified consciousness. Afrofuturism shows how, in a postmodern world of virtual Facebook friends and online LinkedIn colleagues, W.E.B. DuBois’s ideas about double-consciousness apply to everyone, regardless of race and culture (albeit this self-awareness is asymmetrical due to asymmetrical power relationships). Today, we all experience shattered consciousness; we are, as DuBois has suggested, both highly reflective of our interior lives and cognizant of how the world views us. The question, for black artists, is how to develop a black aesthetic in the midst of an increasingly double-voiced and multi-lensed world. Amiri Baraka’s concept of a black aesthetic calls for a black aesthetic that is first, recognizably black; second, mass-oriented; and

70 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling finally, revolutionary. Baraka’s three-pronged criteria give us a sense of what he means the terms “Afro-American,” “mass-oriented,” and “revolutionary” are familiar, but these definitions can be ambiguous and are based, in part, on one’s era: the legal designation of “Afro-American” has changed,2 and ideas once considered “revolutionary” have become commonplace. Baraka also leaves room for interpretation. In a 2017 interview conducted with this author, John Keene argues that the “DNA of the Black Arts Movement is in every contemporary Black American poet and in Black poets all over the world,” and certainly, Baraka’s concept of a blackcentered aesthetic figures into black aesthetic movements (BAM), such as Afrofuturism and AfroSurrealism, that developed from the way BAM constructed and interpreted black aesthetics. Numerous black scholars have identified how black actors and filmmakers subvert dominant culture’s images of blackness. In unexplained presence, cultural studies scholar Tisa Bryant has described how secondary black characters in mainstream movies can function as “inanimate objects … holding up lamps” that highlight the primary characters’ whiteness (149).3 Part of the work of the AfroSurreal text, both film and novel, is demonstrating how a black protagonist, as opposed to a black secondary character, highlights struggles endemic to the black experience. Still, Baraka’s terminology remains ambiguous, particularly when we apply those terms to the literary text. What does it mean to be recognizably black? Does it mean that all the characters (or the majority) are black? Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One connect blackness to history and culture and the ways people interact in present-day reality. Blackness is often associated with AfricanAmericans, but Díaz, an Afro-Caribbean author, reminds us that blackness exists outside the continental United States. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One relies on few physical descriptions of characters, and without descriptions of skin color, hair, and other features, the reader is forced to develop an understanding of race based on something other than appearance. Instead, family history and language function as racial markers, suggesting, again, the black speculative text’s obsession with the visual. Díaz’s and Whitehead’s characters reveal how they see themselves as both inside America and isolated from it. Both Díaz and Whitehead provide their protagonists with few close friends, allowing their protagonists to remain essentially outsiders to America and to their cultures. When Oscar, one of Díaz’s central characters, begins teaching at his former high school, his “only friend on the staff was … a twenty-nine-year old alterna-latina” (265). Whitehead’s protagonist, Mark Spitz, also has a limited social circle. In the zombie apocalypse, Mark Spitz “became a marksmen” and “eliminated that which would destroy him” (176–177). Yet, even in his previous life, before Mark Spitz destroyed zombies, he had learned to perform an “impersonation of caring” (186). Oscar, who is a nerd, and Mark Spitz, a relaxed Gen X slacker, are equally unable to form deep romantic relationships; the cinema becomes the lens for seeing and understanding these

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 71 characters, who remain invisible to potential lovers, and sometimes, to those closest to them. Instead, a distant, cinematic quality—as though a camera’s “all-seeing eye” records the narrative action—provides entry into their characters. While Whitehead and Díaz both employ cinematic storytelling structures, they do so for different purposes. Whitehead’s relentless cinematic eye broadcasts all of our terrors about the future while functioning as a reminder that although the future is flawed, there is still a dim opportunity to change it, as “we make the future. That’s why we’re here” (283). Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao epitomizes the AfroSurreal novel and the way in which AfroSurrealism’s cinematic qualities can reimagine historic traumas. Oscar Wao references history and folklore (through allusions to age-old curses and the myth of el coco, the boogeyman of Spanish folklore), our modern fables (through references to Marvel comic books, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Clay’s Ark, and several other iconic narratives), science (through the characters’ interest in medicine, the solar system, Newtonian physics, and the universe), and history (by citing John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and most prevalently, the Haitian genocide during the reign of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo). Literary critic Tzvetan Todorov argues that hesitation, particularly the reader’s uncertainty whether events are real or imaginary, marks a text as “fantastic” (Todorov 20–26). Similarly, science fiction scholar Isiah Lavender’s definition of science fiction draws inspiration from Darko Suvin’s belief that science fiction is the “literature of cognitive estrangement” (qtd. in Lavender 28), and Lavender maintains that estrangement—a reader’s sense of a story’s weirdness or difference—is part of all speculative fiction, including fairy tales, folklore, and horror (Lavender 29). Still, Lavender views logical explanations for extraordinary or supernatural events as unique to science fiction (29). For Lavender, science fiction is “weird fiction” that argues for a rational explanation (advanced technology, a futuristic setting) for an unusual event, as opposed to fairytales and fables, which focus on magic or offer no logical explanation at all. Taken together, Todorov’s and Lavender’s definitions reveal that while all speculative fiction is strange or weird, speculative fiction’s subgenres vary to the degree that the narrative’s structure renders unusual events as plausible or true. Todorov also argues language’s suggestive qualities help create the fantastic effect; a writer can create doubt about whether an event has occurred simply by selecting a specific verb (a verb’s tense can make it unclear if an event occurs in a distant or ongoing past). To intensify the reader’s sense of displacement, Díaz mingles past, present, and imperfect verb tenses, along with Spanish and English, and formal language with dialect. Díaz’s characters are themselves immigrants (or children of immigrants), located in an unfamiliar and unsettling world, and Oscar Wao is firmly lodged neither in reality or make-believe. What Todorov terms “fantastic,” though, laypersons may describe as surreal; surreal literature hesitates between reality and

72 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling fantasy, and, in doing so, draws attention to the absurdity of “real life.” As readers, we are never certain whether Oscar, the novel’s socially awkward protagonist, is that way because of his own low self-esteem, nerdiness, and cultural alienation, or if stranger phenomena (karma, bad luck) are responsible for his misfortune. This kind of layering marks Díaz’s text as surreal, as both beautiful and marvelous, but it is Oscar Wao’s vast historical framework that defines the novel as AfroSurreal. Contemporary AfroSurreal texts encounter a challenge whenever they examine history and oppression: how can modern writers explore historical events, particularly traumatic ones, in ways that engage contemporary readers? How do these writers make history real and significant for readers who are distracted by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and daily text messages, and how do they do so without glossing over the depth or impact of our collective traumas? Revisiting trauma is never an enjoyable experience, but for writers who view understanding and revisiting history as essential to building a more just world, exploring the past seems essential. Yet these writers recognize they need new tools in order to retell familiar stories. Contemporary AfroSurreal narratives are often infused with cinema; cinematic storytelling techniques, first, create a visceral and sensuous depiction of history, and second, suggest an African notion of temporality, one merging past, present, and future imaginings of events. We associate cinema with modernity, and cinema, the dominant art form of the twenty and twenty-first centuries, has become a recursive genre. Filmmaker Agnès Varda, one of the most groundbreaking women filmmakers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, once described her films as cinécriture and argued that her films were a text to be read. Today’s AfroSurreal novelist, on the other hand, creates near-visual texts, and multiple allusions to various films and filmmaking techniques allow the reader to experience these novels as films. Film scholar David Mayer has explained how Sergei Eisenstein “rhythmic montage” can “distort real time, stretching each harrowing moment into an eternity of peril” (9). I argue a similar psychological process happens in AfroSurreal novels, which include scenes stretched or lengthened to distort time. And while it is true that all novelists, regardless of genre, manipulate time by devoting more space to emotionally significant moments, the AfroSurreal novel tends to do more of what Skip Dine Young describes as the cinematic “suturing over the elements that are missing” (35). In other words, film forces the imagination to fill in the gaps. This process suggests the black cultural experience, in which there are forced absences and gaps. The AfroSurreal novel generates ruptures in known historical “truths” and offers information about lesser known stories, histories, and mythologies in black culture. Blackness is consequently repositioned at the center, rather than the periphery, of these novels. The AfroSurreal novel liberates us, by delving into onedimensional figures of the past and revealing these individuals’ undisclosed, less discussed histories, and juxtaposing these histories with visual descriptions of our psychological and emotional landscapes.

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 73 Using visual technologies to understand the past Díaz realizes his vision, in part, through multiple cinematic references. In Oscar Wao, film references run rampant through the novel: from the references to sci-fi and fantasy films, such as Star Wars, Spiderman, The Matrix, The Dark Knight Returns; to a minor character’s occupation (Oscar’s sister’s boyfriend works at a movie theater); to Oscar’s own name (his first is a nickname for the film community’s highest honor, the Academy Awards). Although contemporary readers may be enchanted by Oscar Wao’s contemporary film references, Díaz’s film references—particularly his cinematic exploration of the Trujillo (the “Failed Cattle Thief”)—fulfill a deeper purpose; they allow us to gain a new and more meaningful appreciation of the past. Hypatía Belicia Cabral, known as Beli, is a no-nonsense mother who treats her son and daughter with little affection; it is through a series of flashbacks that we start to understand why. Díaz’s argument seems to be that brutal environments choke love and make it nearly impossible for it to flourish; through Beli’s personal story, we learn how Trujillo’s violence transformed a dreamy and romantic woman into a bitter mother who seems to do nothing but “scream and hit” (54). Díaz uses cinematic techniques to tell this story; the narrative cuts back and forth from a distant past to a more recent one, and throughout these pages, Díaz scatters subtle references to stock characters and the film community. The cinematic nature of this part of the novel, in particular, gives the past an immediacy and presence it may have lacked, had it been told in another way. Beli meets the major love of her life in a club called El Hollywood, “a favorite hangout of Trujillo’s” (114). The club’s name adds to the cinematic feel, as does Díaz’s refusal to tell his readers Beli’s lover’s name. Known only as “The Gangster,” Beli’s lover recalls a stock film character. He is tough, sexy, and as one of Trujillo’s agents, brutal. As readers, we get an idea of The Gangster’s rough glamor; we see, as a montage, how he courts Beli: He escorted her to the most exclusive restaurants of the capital, took her to clubs that had never tolerated a nonmusician prieto … Treated plays, movies, dances, brought her wardrobes of clothes and pirate chests of jewelry, introduced her to famous celebrities, and once, even to Ramfis Trujillo himself. (124) While we glimpse The Gangster’s seductive side, we learn he is “conflicted about his past deeds” and that he and Beli’s shared desire “to be free” is never possible (125, 134). The five scenes that reveal what happens to Beli once she becomes pregnant with The Gangster’s child are told in a series of cinematic jump cuts, the quick and violent series of images demonstrating the harshness of life during and after Trujillo’s reign. These jump cuts are titled “Revelation,” “Upon Further Reflection,” “Name Game,” and “Truth and

74 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling Consequences,” with the two shortest, “Upon Further Reflection” and “Truth and Consequences” containing exactly the same number of words—53. These scenes’ parallelism forces comparison. Though the exact year is unknown to the reader, it is clear “Upon Further Reflection” takes place in a more recent past (Beli is an older woman living in New York and reflecting on her life in Santo Domingo) than the scenes that follow it. “Name Game” takes place while Beli is still living in Santo Domingo, and “Truth and Consequences” occurs during an even earlier moment in time. The Gangster is further entrenched with Trujillo than we thought; he has married his daughter. In this sequence of images, the reader’s sense of time is being manipulated: we read the scenes happening in the more distant past before we read about more recent events. Our sense of temporality disrupted, we can make connections only through visual images that emphasize pain, coldness, and brutality. In “Name Game,” when Beli and The Gangster are in bed, in a “love motel,” the air above them is sliced by “blades pursued by a half-dozen flies”; in the later scene, “Upon Reflection,” we see Beli “freezing in basement apartments in the Bronx and working her fingers to the bone” (137). The jump cuts thus reveal Oscar Wao’s message: life cannot be created or sustained in environments of such deep-seated cruelty. Beli’s struggles challenge the idea of class as the primary form of oppression. Marxist scholar Gregory Meyerson argues that the economic and political are inseparable and puts forth an argument advancing the primacy of class above other forms of oppression. Further, Meyerson believes that recognizing the primacy of class means more than just improving labor conditions (i.e. emancipate the productive forces), which inevitably leads to more globalization, or fighting against the impersonal forces of class systems. Meyerson notes that Marx himself was non-racist and anti-slavery; further, he argues that an economic determinist worldview allowed the proletariat to acknowledge common interests and fight against multiple oppressions. Underlying Meyerson’s argument for the primacy of class are the ideas that race cannot be reduced to phenotype (lower class white people and the ruling class were not of the same race) and that racism developed from the need to control the masses (using the English and the Irish, Bacon’s rebellion as examples). Diaz’s portrayal of Beli belies Meyerson’s argument. Beli’s oppression as a dark-skinned woman who encounters colorism and sexual harassment makes it difficult to argue that all of her misery is a result of poverty. Rather, Beli’s life reveals class as a complicated infrastructure. Beli is left, essentially, an orphan, when her father is tortured by Trujillo, and the family loses their fortune; as a result, she spends the first years of her life in poverty. Yet, arguably, Beli moves from one class to another when she moves in with her aunt, La Inca, who provides her with a middle-class education and knowledge of her family history. Because of La Inca’s support, it becomes harder to see class as the determining force behind Beli’s oppression; Beli’s gendered oppression nearly lead to her death at the hands of a violent lover. Oppression, Díaz reveals, is strange, complex, and intertwined.

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 75 When Beli moves to the United States, we understand how her toughness is a direct result of her years of struggle and pain. The idea of lost and unspoken histories figures in here, as Beli rarely speaks of her pain, and we see how Díaz uses cinematic storytelling techniques as a vehicle for reclaiming and restructuring lost histories. Yunior, Díaz’s most dominant narrator, recreates Beli’s story and offers different alternatives to the reason that Abelard was captured and tortured by Trujillo. One possibility Yunior offers is that Abelard was writing an uncomplimentary book about the dictator: I only wish I could have read that thing … . Alas, the grimoire in question Yu (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive. Not his wife or children knew about its existence, either. Only one of the servants who helped him collect the folktales on the sly … . What can I tell you? In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow.” (245–246) The words “supernatural shadow” suggest doubt. Yunior is a storyteller who doesn’t quite believe in magic yet is not entirely unconvinced of it either. In Oscar Wao, Yunior, who dates Oscar’s sister Lola, provides an outside perspective. He is able to look at Oscar’s life from an impartial perspective and create multiple alternatives for stories that have been swallowed or forgotten by history. Beli’s life is so painful that when she is an orphan: “of those nine years … Beli did not speak” (258). Beli’s silence is again emphasized by Yunior when he tells us “[i]t says a lot about Beli that for forty years she never leaked word one about that period of her life” (258). Yunior functions as a camera, cutting from one moment in the narrative to another and providing details and information about various historical possibilities. Keeping these ideas in mind and recognizing the problematics associated with writing about a black aesthetic, I return to a subset of Amiri Baraka’s definition of the black aesthetic, his definition of AfroSurreal Expressionism. Baraka’s definition provides an opportunity for discussing the commonalities located within several contemporary texts. By focusing on contemporary AfroSurrealism, I hope to explore the way these texts can be considered modernist, in the sense that they contain an awareness of society’s fragments and divisions. In addition, I hope to examine the ways in which several contemporary texts theorize about race, class, beauty, psychology, history, myth, technology, folklore, and science. Ethnographer James Clifford explores the connections between the ethnographic activity of the 1920s and 1930s and the artistic avant-garde movement of the same period (539). Clifford is interested in how a changing, artificially constructed urban world affected the thinking and development of artists and scientists. In other words, war fueled a cosmopolitanism that made people more aware of humanity in all its forms; this, Clifford argues, is what separated modern ethnography from the exoticism of the nineteenth

76 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling century (542). For Clifford, the ethnographers and the Surrealists recognized the cultural Other as both familiar (the Surrealists could recognize the humanity of the Other) and strange (the Surrealists were also able to recognize cultural differences). Thus, a surrealist perspective made modern cultural relativism possible. For Clifford, the funhouse mirror of our modern cultural situation, i.e. our recognition of others’ humanity, sparks creativity and intellectual curiosity. Clifford details Marcel Mauss’ relationship with George Bataille and how that relationship provided Mauss with a new way of thinking about his ethnography. Likewise, Clifford explains how Bataille’s understanding of other cultures allowed him to understand cultural rules as having simultaneously positive and negative associations. For Bataille, we obey our culture’s rules when transgressing a rule results in negative feelings/consequences (e.g. shame, loss of life or freedom, etc.), and we disobey these rules when they result in positive emotions (e.g. pleasure, freedom, a greater understanding of ourselves as individualistic thinkers). Oscar violates his culture’s “rules.” First Lola, Oscar’s sister, and then Yunior, his roommate, attempt to teach him the rules, how he is to behave as a Dominican man. As a Surrealist, Bataille celebrated the positive emotions associated with violating cultural taboos, and in a way, Oscar does too. A surrealist perspective, Clifford explains, implies that we should recognize, rather than ignore, cultural differences, and that these differences should be neither privileged nor mocked. Yet, what happens when the othering occurs within a culture? Part of the fukú, or family curse, is that awkward, shy Oscar does not fit into stereotypical notions of a Dominican male. Oscar essentially feels othered by members of his own culture. Clifford argues that our experience of other cultures is ironic, but how well do we recognize and experience strangeness within our own culture or even the differences that exist with people who look and sound like us, but who may hold ideologically different points of view? If to understand an alien culture, we must create an “us” and a “them,” then it seems we can never escape binaries and oppositional thinking. It is possible that in order for the human mind to make meaning, then we’re forced into thinking “this is like me, yet unlike me.” Regardless of whether it is possible to view another culture through the lens of a mirror or a window, Marina Ottaway and David Ottaway’s AfroCommunism suggests how Marxist-influenced politics may be part of the AfroSurreal text. AfroCommunism reveals the 1970s as a turning point: in 1974, several African countries (Ethiopia, Benin, Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar) adopted Marxism. Certain sections of Díaz’s novel takes place during the early 1960s, during both the rise of AfroCommunism, and the reign of Trujillo. Because Trujillo flirted with Communism while his oppressive regime kept Communist leaders in jail or under surveillance, Trujillo’s reign can be described as Marxist in name only. Oscar Wao is a clearly anti-Trujillo text. At the same time, it is also an anti-capitalist text, one that critiques poverty in the United States through Beli’s

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 77 experiences as an immigrant. Marxism, then, coinciding as it does with the rise of Pan-Africanism and the Black Power Movement, provides a background for helping us understand the novel’s politics. Oscar Wao is an anarchist, anti-capitalist text that investigates the psychological effects of repressive rule on the most vulnerable populations: poor women of color. It is a novel that argues for the horrors associated with authority, and the importance of rebelling against it. A voyage into Afrofuturism: visual technologies and surviving the dystopia Whitehead infuses Zone One, his zombie apocalypse novel, with cinematic references. Yet, the science underlying his project is what delineates it from the AfroSurreal (Whitehead’s John Henry Days). Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work suggests that zombies have at least a somewhat scientific or psychological basis,4 and so Whitehead’s zombie plague, while not exactly realistic, is not altogether implausible either. Still, some readers may consider Zone One to fall under the category of AfroSurrealism; however, the novel’s undercurrent of pessimism mixed with absurdity positions it as Afrofuturist. Afrofuturism, which shares Futurism’s fascination with the future, cannot help but to have developed a somewhat skeptical outlook. While some scholars have argued that the Futurism would not have been possible without the trauma of World War One, Afrofuturist scholar Kodwo Eshun and Paul Gilroy argue that another form of trauma—the trauma of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery—serves as the foundation for modernity (Eshun 288). These slaves endured not just physical trauma, but also psychological domination, terror, and pain. And what happens when multicultural communities cause divergent ideas to intersect, or position one culture’s knowledge as dominant over another’s? Colson Whitehead’s Afrofuturistic Zone One investigates the multiple traumas of modern life in the quintessential, multiracial American city (New York City), and the ways in which ethnic outsiders use humor and contemporary media to relay their experiences. Whitehead’s New York encompasses the “eponymous sitcoms of Jewish comedians; the pay-cable Dominican gangster shows; the rat-a-tat verses of totemic hip-hop singles” (26), the very core of New York City culture. Zone One is a novel cynical in its argument that one function of modernity is domination and control, but transgressive in its suggestion that diversity can also be powerful. Mary Chayko discusses Afrofuturism’s reliance on language. Chayko argues that online technologies are not necessarily superficial, and can create a “sociomental space” in which we can form deep and meaningful bonds. Chayko’s idea of a “sociomental space” where ideas can be shared and developed suggest why many AfroSurreal texts suggest that online technologies can help bring about social change. Whitehead uses film references to create a sociomental space, a field of popular cultural knowledge, where ideas can be

78 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling shared, challenged, and explored. Afrofuturism is concerned with how people of color have been overlooked as technological innovators: While access to technology remains one of the most pressing obstacles for people of color, the editors write, they have often overcome this challenge by making do with what they have (8). By exploring their creative contributions (particularly in music), the editors provide an alternative to the misconception that people of color can serve only as victims of technical advancement. Zone One revisits familiar terrain—the Zombie novel—and revitalizes the genre by emphasizing how, traditionally, zombies have represented our fear of the unfamiliar and the unknown, even as that fear imbues our lives with a sense of meaning. Whitehead’s novel is an amalgamation of surrealist and futuristic elements: Whitehead’s dark humor is characteristic of the AfroSurreal, but his portrayal of a gloomy, regressive future recalls the dystopian vision of other futuristic science fiction novels. For example, in one of the funniest allusions to New York City’s unique character, Mark Spitz, Whitehead’s protagonist, notes the zombies’ aimless stampede over Central Park, their “moving first this way and then strolling in another direction until … they readjusted their idiot course,” and remarks of the park “My God, it’s been taken over by tourists” (Whitehead 92). Yet juxtaposed against this humor is an Afrofuturist critique of technology’s capacity for destruction. Mark Spitz is a black man who, as a member of a zombie-fighting team, wields power and control over technology and his life, but throughout the novel, we see the misery of powerless people who have been victimized by technology, mainly that which produced the zombies. Both Afrofuturism and AfroSurrealism provide alternate portraits of blackness and address the psychological pressures of modern life, but how (and why), specifically, are these stories being told? The technology of an era has always pervaded modern storytelling, both dictating the stories we tell and revising the way that we tell them. The prominence of visual technologies (i.e. film, television, video games, and online photographs) means that now, novels and cinematic images are in constant conversation. Our modern brains are more accustomed to film techniques than ever before; we think in what pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein once termed “film language.” These film techniques dominate written texts; in Afrofuturistic and contemporary AfroSurreal novels, we see sentences, scenes, and sometimes entire chapters written as montages and jump cuts. The protagonists of these novels often view themselves cinematically, as characters within a film. bell hooks has discussed how black women spectators, who consciously resist societal oppression, may develop an “oppositional gaze” (122–123). While this discussion focuses on texts written by African-American authors, the concept applies to any postmodern novel—or to any writers who are hyper-aware of how temporality affects our thinking. In the Introduction to the anthology The Secret History of Science Fiction, editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel suggest that, as our present becomes more fantastic and futuristic (e.g. smartphones

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 79 that place a universe of knowledge in our hands, medical advancements, ventures into space), we experience our lives as science fiction cinema. The Italian Futurist Manifesto argued for speed, “energy and fearlessness.” Whitehead’s robust language emphasizes the futuristic qualities of his work, even as he rejects the sexism and fascism embedded in the Futurist manifesto. Whitehead’s novel depicts women conquering their own zombies, and even more frequently, reveals the damaging effects of authoritarian rule. Whitehead argues for the importance of imaginary landscapes5 where people can achieve freedom and control and develop strategies for surviving real-world oppression. It is that very form of fantasy that allows African-Americans to adopt protective postures and gain genuine self-confidence, to “inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassible force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements” (Dery 8). Whitehead makes it clear that Mark Spitz lives in a “sci-fi” nightmare where it does not seem to be much relief. In that sense, Zone One is Afrofuturistic in every sense of the word. As Afro-Modernist Alexander G. Weheliye writes in Afrofuturist text, the realities of blackness—the soul and spirit—are transmitted through music, language. But why? I argue for black people who have been colonized or who have lived under a racist and oppressive system, the knowledge that blackness can be constructed—that black family members can easily move north and pass into whiteness or that what is considered black in one society is white in another—allows for an understanding of race as an optical illusion. Black music has also generated a longer, more in-depth “discourse of authenticity” than has black film (Gilroy 99), in part because black music has been in existence longer, and, until recently, has been a less expensive medium. Black writers who operate on both visual and aural levels (the visual representation of text on paper the sounds produced through written replication) have functioned cinematically, as film often incorporates both sound and images. Afrofuturist texts, which often reference high-tech, special-effects heavy sci-fi films, are perhaps even more cinematic than other forms of black fiction. In Zone One, film swallows the novel; visual technology lives and breathes as one of the characters, and the novel’s protagonist views himself as a character from a film. As Whitehead weaves cinematic references throughout his written text, it becomes almost impossible to read Zone One without recalling Night of the Living Dead or The Walking Dead, the comic book-turned television series. In other words, as readers we experience Whitehead’s novel as cinema. Height, for example, a dominant theme throughout all of Whitehead’s work, becomes Zone One’s most entrenched metaphor for the risks and thrills of progress. For Whitehead, the skyscraper, those enormous buildings that “humiliated runts through verticality,” represents how we seek the new and unexplored even as we experience a metaphorical fear of heights and recognize the dangers associated with our ambition. And, ironically, New York City’s man-built skyscrapers

80 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling and skyline only remind Mark Spitz, Zone One’s protagonist, of his smallness and ineptitude; in an image that recalls Fritz Lang’s futuristic film Metropolis, Spitz sees himself as “a mote cycling in the wheels of a giant clock … tumbling through its teeth” (5). Through multiple other references to sci-fi/fantasy television and film, Whitehead develops this idea that ostentatious displays of progress only increase our awareness of all we fail to achieve. And, from the “monster movies on TV” to “the women in monster movies bolting through the woods” to the “ones still standing at the credit roll” (5), Whitehead’s highly visual novel is haunted as much by the vestiges of modern life as the zombies themselves. Whitehead’s Mark Spitz does not long for a reunion with an onscreen image, for he is the onscreen image. We readers learn how Mark Spitz’s name originates in seventeen dazzling pages of smash-cuts. When a zombie cleanup colleague asks, “Why do they call you Mark Spitz?” Mark Spitz’s answer occurs through a series of cuts and flashbacks. Whitehead, as filmmaker/novelist, cuts back and forth from flashbacks to Happy Acres (the relief camp) to present-tense narrative overlaid with Mark Spitz own voiceover. Whitehead’s technique, which is already postmodern, becomes more so as the voice-over relies on cinematic references to reveal Mark Spitz’s identity. We learn Mark Spitz is someone who, like all of us, watches “disaster flicks and horror movies” and believes “he’d survive the particular death scenario,” and becomes “the only cast member to heed the words of the bedraggled prophet in Act I” (165–166). Mark Spitz views himself as film character, “as the one left to explain it all to the skeptical world after the end credits,” even as he recognizes that real life brings its own surreal horrors: “the real movie started after the first one ended, in the impossible return to things before” (166). In a novel that rarely mentions race, how does Whitehead’s novel reflect ideas about blackness and how blacks’ survival provides a paradigm for surviving other types of oppression? Zone One acknowledges that racism still exists in the apocalypse; in this new world, people are still grouped by “general size and occasionally by color,” and Quiet Storm, one of the zombie fighters, is “one of the new skinheads, who shaved their scalps to commemorate their deprivations” (174–175). What separates Mark Spitz from the other zombie survivors, including Quiet Storm, is that he is not at all optimistic or hopeful. He knows the odds are against him. Yet he is determined to survive. He comes from a people who have survived worse— slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, lynchings, police brutality—and the irony of Mark Spitz’s nickname is that he cannot swim. He knows the odds are against black men: “The Center for Disease Control notes that Blacks aged 5–19 years were 5.5 times more likely to drown in a swimming pool than their white peers” but Mark Spitz decides to face a sea of zombies— Whitehead’s allegories for oppression and alienation from society—even though he knows he may drown.

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 81 The destructive nature of poverty is one of Zone One’s central themes. Published just three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the Great Recession, the novel is a metaphor for the poverty and hopelessness that inflicted American life: When Mark Spitz was a child, his father had shared his favorite nuclearwar movies with him. Father-son bonding on overcast afternoons. Freshfaced rising stars who never made it big and crag-faced character actors marched through the acid-rain narratives and ash-smeared landscapes, soldiering on, slapping hysterical comrades across the face—get a grip on yourself, we’re going to make it—dropping one by one as they chased the rumors of sanctuary. He asked, “What does ‘apocalypse’ mean Daddy?” and his father pressed pause and told him, “it means that in the future, things will be even worse than they are now.” (147) When Mark Spitz’s father watches zombie movies with him “on overcast afternoons,” both father and son have an awareness that in a zombie apocalypse, life is not likely to get any better. This is contrasted with the slow, breaking away that those around them experience in the actual zombie apocalypse. Those around them refuse to adapt to their new realities and abandon their lives, in bits and pieces, with the minuscule, hardscrabble wedge of space between the piled-up furniture and the apartment door they had squeezed through … the debris on the steps kicked away in the escape … the one blank window among the other boarded-up windows on the first floor of the farmhouse. (165) Whitehead’s depiction of the farmhouse appears to be a reference to the famous farmhouse in the zombie film Night of the Living Dead. The website seqart.org describes how the Night of the Living Dead’s superficially safe and outwardly quaint farmhouse reinforces the film’s themes of “racism, the Vietnam War, a patriarchal society … distrust of authorities” and the “shattering of 1950s optimism” (Azevedo). Some film scholars view the zombies in Night of the Living Dead as representing soldiers from Vietnam and a war out of their control. The zombies in Zone One represent another kind of unmanageable change. Many people also lost their homes during the great recession, and suddenly had to move to a different neighborhood, or witnessed families of color enter previously white suburbs. The fears and anxieties of a white middle class are thus reflected in the housing: “I thought you said the doors were fixed. We don’t want squirrels and rats and God knows what else moving in here” (205). Whitehead also includes scenes of a white middle class struggling to maintain its optimism: “We can beat this, this is just a temporary thing, if we keep our wits” (62). Mark Spitz,

82 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling who lacks such optimism, and instead, seems to survive on dry wit, imagines “the block association of a tight-knit suburb, some planned community off the interstate … corralling all their infected kin into the trailer … to a place where they could be cured, or set free” (180). Mark Spitz represents struggle without hope. Through his description of the gig-economy, Whitehead offers further evidence that this is a novel about the recession and the rise of service jobs that serve a technocracy. Afrofuturism rejects the idea of people of color as primitive and shows black people in positions where they own and manipulate technology, even if that technology can have unsettling repercussions. Mark Spitz has mastered his “coffee job,” in “Custom Relationship Management of a coffee multinational,” a technology-oriented position at a company that parodies Facebook and Starbucks (186). Mark Spitz’s job is to “nurture feelings of brand intimacy” by offering faux congratulations or condolences for “meaningful life event[s]” (184–185). The tragedy of Mark Spitz isn’t that he loses himself during the zombie apocalypse; it’s how superficial human relationships have already become, as a result of our emotionally isolated and uninspiring labor, jobs forcing us to “[enter] into artifice easily” and create “impersonations of caring” (186). These are jobs, that as Mark Spitz college buddy advises him, don’t “require any skills” (185). Whitehead’s novel is grim, and our final image is of Mark Spitz “walk[ing] into the sea of the dead” (322). Though we don’t see Mark Spitz die, as readers, we are left questioning his chances for survival, wondering if Mark Spitz can, in fact, overcome the alienation of modern life. Mark Spitz does not “like his chances of making it to the terminal,” but earlier in the novel, Whitehead positioned Mark Spitz in a similarly impossible situation, and Mark Spitz does not die because “[he] could not die” in a world where one’s will is all that matters (182). When the camera angle is on Mark Spitz and the zombies, the metaphor for his fears and insecurities, he cannot help but to survive: “He had the ammo. He took them all down” (183). In Zone One, the zombies become a metaphor for moving forward and the necessity of doing so. At the same time, Zone One is not a hopeful novel. As Mark Spitz reminds us, “hope is a gateway drug, don’t do it” (222). Not only is the present hopeless, but the words “he could not die” remind us that death—the afterlife—is rejected as an alternative. This is a novel of finding the dark humor in survival. Film scholar Laura Mulvey has revisited her theory of scopophilia, the pleasure of watching and objectifying a less action-oriented character, while identifying with the film’s active protagonist, the larger, more glamorous projection of the self. Throughout Zone One, we read about—and come to understand—a character experiencing scopophilia, and the more we identify with the character, the more we are implicated in his pain and struggles. As readers, we undergo scopophilia just as Mark Spitz does; Whitehead’s highly visual novel forces us to imagine Mark Spitz’s body, to gaze lovingly upon it, and see it reflected in our minds. Mark Spitz and the reader share the same tragic flaw:

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 83

Figure 3.2 Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014 Polystyrene foam, sugar Approx. 35.5 x 26 x 75.5 feet (10.8 x 7.9 x 23 m) Installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery, A project of Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY, 2014 Photo: Jason Wyche

we are unable to separate Mark Spitz’s true self from the cinematic and largerthan-life image he holds of himself. Mark Spitz, like many of us, views himself as the hero of his own science fiction fantasy. Notes 1 See Manthia Diawara’s Black American Cinema; Ed Guerrero’s Framing Blackness; bell hooks’ “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” 2 This conversation was part of a personal interview conducted in 2013. 3 For more information on the murkiness of legal classifications and race, see Adrienne Berard’s Water Tossing Boulders, a study of the Lum family, a Chinese American family that sued to desegregate schools. 4 In Tell My Horse, her second book of anthropology, Hurston photographs a zombie and participates in voodoo rituals. 5 In the Afrofuturist novel, the imaginary landscapes are in fact imaginary, while in the AfroSurreal novel, the reader is unsure whether the imaginary is “real,” or a dream or illusion.

84 AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling Works cited Anderson, Reynaldo. “Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Art Movement: Notes on a Manifesto.” How We Get to Next. Medium. https://howwegettonext.com/afrofuturism2-0-and-the-blackspeculative-art-movement-notes-on-a-manifesto-f4e2ae6b3b4d/. Azevedo, Rafael Alves. “Fighting Two Wars: George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as a Critique of 1960s American Society.” Sequart.org. 15 April 2015. http://sequart.org/ magazine/56503/fighting-two-wars-george-a-romero-night-of-the-living-dead/. Baraka, Amiri. “Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol. 22, No. 2, 1988, pp. 164–166. Barber, Tiffany. “Cyborg Grammar.” Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 21–43. Bryant, Tisa. Unexplained Presence. Leon Works, 2007. Céspedes, Diógenes and Silvio Torres-Saillant. “Fiction Is the Poor Man’s Cinema: An Interview with Junot Díaz.” Callaloo. Vol. 23, No. 3, 2000, pp. 892–907. doi:10.1353/ cal.2000.0131. Chayko, Mary. “From Cave Painting to Chat Room.” Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age. State University of New York Press, 2002. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Surrealism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 23, No. 4, October 1981, pp. 539–564. Dery, Mark, editor. “Black to the Future.” Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Duke University Press, 1994. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead, 2007. Dine, Skip Young. Psychology at the Movies. Wiley, 2012. Ducker, Eric. “Behind the Scenes of Flying Lotus’ ‘Never Catch Me’ Video with Director Hiro Murai.” The Fader. 9 October 2014. www.thefader.com/2014/10/09/flying-lotus-nevercatch-me-behind-the-scenes-hiro-murai. Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations in Afro-Futurism.” The New Centennial Review. Vol. 3, No. 2, 2003, pp. 287–302. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Verso, 2012. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Movies and Mass Culture, edited by John Belton. Rutgers University Press, 1996, pp. 247–264. http://my.ilstu.edu/ ~jkshapi/Hooks.pdf. Jones Hogu, Barbara. “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRICOBRA.” http:// areachicago.org/the-history-philosophy-and-aesthetics-of-africobra/. Kelly, Patrick James and John Kessel. Feeling Very Strange. Tachyon, 2006. Kreiss, Daniel. “Performing the past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and the Afro-Future UnderGround, 1954–1968.” African American Review. Vol. 45, No. 1/2, 2012, pp. 197–203. Lavender, Isiah. Race in American Science Fiction. Indiana University Press, 2011. Mayer, David. Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Potemkin. Grossman, 1972. Meyerson, Gregory. “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others.” Cultural Logic. Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2001. https://clogic.eserver.org/3-1%262/meyerson% 28newest%29. Moten, Fred. “Visible Music.” In the Break: The Aesthetics of a Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp. 171–232. Ottaway, Marina and David Ottaway. “From African Socialism to Marxism-Leninism.” AfroCommunism. Africana Publishing Company, 1986. Rosemont, Franklin and Robin D.G. Kelley. Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist. Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. University of Texas, 2009.

AfroSurreal and Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 85 Selzer, Linda. “New Eclecticism: An Interview with Colson Whitehead.” Callaloo. Vol. 31, No. 2, 2008, pp. 393–401. doi:10.1353/cal.0.0088. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to A Literary Genre. Cornell University Press, 1975. Weems, Carrie Mae. “Adger Cowans.” Bomb. www.bombmagazine.org/article/1000219/adgercowans. Weheliye, Alexander. “Feenin’; Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Music.” Social Text. Vol. 71, 2002, pp. 21–47. Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Random House, 2011. Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013. Wright, John S. “Introduction.” Echo Tree, edited by Eugene Redmond. Coffee House Press, 2003, pp. ix–xxxv.

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The postmodern fables of Victor LaValle’s Big Machine and Summer Brenner’s Oakland Tales

Is the contemporary AfroSurreal text a form of slipstream? Jorges Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” a progenitor of slipstream as detailed in John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly’s Feeling Very Strange: An Anthology of Slipstream, explores a place of infinite knowledge, a strange dimension that produces an immediate and “extravagant happiness.” Such is the world Victor LaValle creates in Big Machine and Summer Brenner introduces in Oakland Tales. Yet, while the happiness Borges describes is rapidly “followed by an excessive depression,” the recovery project imagined by LaValle and Brenner leads to deeper personal and familial connections. For LaValle and Brenner, a satisfying life can only be achieved through an understanding of and a reconciliation with history, especially histories that have been forgotten, obscured, or misrepresented. This faith in historical knowledge—the belief that access to one’s racial or cultural memories—can lead to a more meaningful life, may be the key to distinguishing AfroSurreal literature from slipstream, which tends to view history with more ambivalence. Grace Dillon offers a thought-provoking definition of Native slipstream as “stories with time travel, alternate realities, and multiverses” based in philosophies that have “been around for millenia” (3–4). Using Dillon’s definition, perhaps one might propose AfroSurrealism as a form of slipstream, just as Dillon suggests that Native slipstream shares, with other slipstreams, a “sardonic humor and bittersweet hope” (5). This is convincing— AfroSurrealism’s humor and weirdness position it close to slipstream—still, the specific traditions of Afrofuturist scholarship, with its highly specific definitions from Kodwo Eshun’s argument of “inquiry into production of futures” as Afrofuturism’s “fundamental” concern to Nnedi Okorafor’s theory of Africanfuturism, may argue for analyzing AfroSurrealism in relation to these projects and their defined goals (289). The cultural knowledge is within the text, and the black protagonist is at the center of the story, rather than the periphery. Understanding how AfroSurreal texts incorporate history helps us to better understand how this literature can be used to create social change. Scholars and activists have examined the empowering qualities of black historical knowledge: examines how “racial esteem has

Postmodern fables 87 been found to be a significant predictor of Blacks’ self-esteem” (313); Stefan McDonald writes of the “powerful illumination of the historical relationship between slavery and the current academic underachievement of African American students” and suggests that black historical knowledge can increase black pride (7–10). The AfroSurreal texts, as opposed to slipstream texts, reexamine history and reveal how history allows us to better navigate present-day oppression, maintain mental health, and honor historical ties. AfroSurrealism, like slipstream, could perhaps be described as a subgenre of science fiction; Kelly and Kessel argue, convincingly, that contemporary science fiction examines people’s “anxieties … and attempts to cope with their existential situations” (The Secret History of Science Fiction 14). I would assert that if one’s definition of science fiction includes strange events that hinge on uncertainty—the idea that an event may have taken place in the narrative or may be the result of a character’s anxieties—then AfroSurrealism falls under the realm of science fiction. AfroSurrealism and slipstream are close cousins, but AfroSurrealism distinguishes itself from slipstream in how it employs specific historical knowledge for the liberation of the individual and communities. Slipstream is described by Kelly and Kessel as the “literature of cognitive dissonance and of strangeness triumphant” (xi). The fifteen stories in Kelley and Kessel’s anthology, Feeling Very Strange, explore social issues, but race is not (ostensibly) central to the discussion. Aimee Bender’s “The Healer,” appears in the anthology, and explores gender, not race: although race isn’t investigated, two characters, fire girl and ice girl, suggest that society discourages young women from showing anger. Set in a familiar world (a high school complete with science class and popular, cigarette-smoking teens), “The Healer” is a feminist story, as Bender’s girl with the “hand made of fire” suffers for her passionate nature while her cool ice girl with the “hand made of ice” is praised for her calm and abilities as a healer (27). Another story in the collection, George Saunders’ “Sea Oak,” dissects class issues through an absurd world where the male protagonist works at a strip club called Joysticks where the “minute your Cute Rating drops you’re a goner” (88). Bender and Saunders have created humorous stories, and humor is a quality slipstream texts share with AfroSurreal ones; still, race seems less central to the story. Of course one could argue for intersectionality, the proposition that race is always present and continuously informs how we define and interpret gender and class, even when race isn’t explicitly discussed. One could argue the bodies in “The Healer” and “Sea Oak” are perhaps coded as white, precisely because the protagonists don’t have to confront racial stereotyping or consider other forms of surveillance and restrictions upon their bodies. John Keene has described the “desire to be seen” as an “attempt to escape alterity … to shift from margin to the center,” and the visual codes and presentations associated with one’s body may impact one’s ability to gain and maintain power. I wish to argue that visual markers may of course structure and inform blackness, but also, that blackness encompasses specific cultural

88 Postmodern fables knowledge necessary for reading, navigating, and surviving an oppression that overlaps with—and deepens—existing class conflicts. The AfroSurreal text, like the slipstream text, acknowledges the modern world as strange, confusing, and overwhelming in its contradictions. But guess what happens when race or culture becomes a larger part of the story? The AfroSurreal texts often employ humor, and the humor in them often reveals the absurdities of a racist society. In AfroSurreal texts, the black protagonist experiences oppression and marginalization as a result of racism, even as race is revealed to be an ambiguous and difficult-to-define phenomenon. Perhaps, Jonathan Lethem’s “Light and the Sufferer,” a story featured in Feeling Very Strange, and one of the only stories to feature black characters, creates slipstream that borders on AfroSurrealism, yet offers a less comprehensive exploration of black history and culture[s]. Don, the protagonist of “Light and the Sufferer” is white; however, as readers we learn that from Paul, Don’s brother and the narrator of the story, that he is “white” only at the moment that Lethem introduces the black characters: Don walked them towards me. A fat black man with a gigantic knitted hat: Kaz. Another black man, smaller in every way, with a little beard, and wearing a weirdly glossy, puffed-out gold coat: Drey. Nobody my brother knew had a regular name. And they all called him “Light,” for his being white, I suppose. Although 24 paragraphs appear before we become certain of Don’s whiteness, Lethem suggests Don’s whiteness through markers of white middleclass identity: Paul is in his “junior year of college at Santa Cruz” (53), and we learn that Don’s parents named him Donovan, a name associated with both black and white boys, only “because all their friends had already named their kids Dylan” (53–54). Don’s parents’ willingness to name him Dylan, one of the top twenty most common names for white boys, when contrasted with Paul’s claim that “[n]obobdy my brother knew had a regular name” suggests whiteness as the dominant, “regular” way of interacting with the world. We, as readers, are to assume that Don’s drug habit and “black metal gun” are out of place in white middle-class society, and we are to be as “freaked” out by their presence as Paul (53). Don’s street name, “Light,” represents whiteness/lightness, but the Sufferer, the black alien creature that begins following him, represents both Don’s drug habit and his inability to escape blackness, a blackness society associates with violence, power, and criminality: The Sufferer opened its mouth at him, a black O, and its ears, or what I was mistaking for ears, wrinkled forward. Now that I could see it up close, it really didn’t look so much like a cat. The face was really more human, like the sphinx with a toothless octopus mouth. (68–69)

Postmodern fables 89 While the term “Sufferer” suggests struggle and suffering, Lethem suggests the Sufferer’s power by referring to it as a “sphinx” (68) and “a giant panther” (57), images that recall both Egyptian mythology and the Black Panther party. Don and Paul view the Sufferer with a combination of annoyance and fear. The Sufferer is both the “‘big black animal from space’” and a presence that shields white people from the most punishing realities of urban life. Lethem describes how the Sufferers “keep people out of trouble” and how Don’s troubles stem from moving from “[w]hite people’s drugs, drugs for the kids who stay in school, go to college” and “finding the other kind, the drugs for the black kids” (75). Lethem tells a story about race and societal inequalities, but this story is told from a white protagonist’s point of view. In this story, blackness exists, simultaneously, as a nightmare, a “guardian angel,” and a means of preserving whiteness (80). Yet, AfroSurreal narratives provide a different perspective on race than what we find in other surreal, strange texts that do not feature a black protagonist. LaValle’s and Brenner’s novels examine life from the perspective of poor, black protagonists, and though their protagonists face harsh realities, blackness is not described as nightmarish—nor is blackness measured by how it delineates whiteness. Rather, their black protagonists exist in a complicated, intricate world where their interactions with other black characters allow them to develop and define a healthy, resilient self. Ricky, the protagonist of LaValle’s novel, is a recovering heroin addict, “off for three years” at the novel’s opening (26). Like Lethem’s Don, Ricky has an addiction, but unlike Don, Ricky is able to describe the shame he feels after having been addicted to heroin for twenty years (95). Like Don, Ricky encounters a ghostlike supernatural force, the Swamp Angels, but unlike the Sufferers, who illustrate how blackness defines and establishes whiteness, the Swamp Angels represent the challenges and triumphs of black life, how racial oppression “sucked [them] backward while in midair” before they “floated to the ground” and learned to “used the air to move” (284). The Swamp Angels’ endurance and ability to survive allows them to “soar” (284). As LaValle describes the Swamp Angels’ flight and its series of starts and stutters, it “felt natural to be awed” by their power and grace (330). Brenner’s novel also avoids a nightmarish depiction of blackness. In Oakland Tales, blackness deepens intracommunal ties rather than serve as an omen or moral consciousness for white people. Jada, Brenner’s protagonist, has a father who is in prison and for her “the outside world was too dangerous” (38). Despite missing her father, encountering bullies, and barely passing her classes, Jada demonstrates hope and an interest in the world and her community. Throughout Oakland Tales, Brenner reminds her readers of Jada’s hopeful attitude, even in less than favorable circumstances: “Jada had to believe in hope. For her daddy’s sake, she had to believe” (37). In Chapter 5, Brenner purposefully juxtaposes Jada’s hope with the harsh realities of life. Titled “Mountains and Stars,” the mountains serve as a metaphor for the shame her family feels over her

90 Postmodern fables father’s imprisonment, which “nobody mentioned,” while the stars represent Jada’s potential—Jada’s teacher recognizes her talent and has recommended her for a science program (41–43). Brenner situates blackness as a site of hope and the community as a source that can restore and replenish optimism. Readers could argue that black speculative fiction that “slips” between reality and fantasy should be described as slipstream, rather than AfroSurreal, texts. These readers would have a point: though AfroSurreal texts, featuring black protagonists, are rarely included in discussions of the New Wave of science fiction and its associated genres, AfroSurrealism is, in fact, closely related to slipstream. Similar to slipstream texts, AfroSurreal texts share a fascination with psychology and the unconscious and a willingness to integrate humor, irony, science, and myth. Ted Chiang, an Asian writer, is included in Feeling Very Strange, and his short story, “Hell is the Absence of God” examines modern-day alienation with a humor that feels very AfroSurreal. I argue that AfroSurrealism’s emphasis on black culture and ongoing oppression separates AfroSurrealism from most slipstream. Also, the author’s race is of less importance than whether a text features a black protagonist and addresses the realities of racial oppression. AfroSurreal texts often discuss police brutality, job discrimination, and colorism, topics that seldom appear in slipstream texts. In fact, in the article “Slipstream 101,” Pawel Frelik, former president of the Science Fiction Research Association, discusses nine definitions of slipstream, yet none of these definitions specifically reference race or racial oppression. Because racial oppression continues to affect many people, readers may be interested in how AfroSurrealism incorporates some of slipstream’s innovations, spontaneity, imagination, and humor, yet does so in service of examining life through the eyes of a black protagonist. Still, AfroSurreal and slipstream stories share similar storytelling structures, one of which is the mise en abyme, a storytelling structure found in AfroSurreal and slipstream texts. Yet, how AfroSurreal texts and slipstream texts engage these storytelling structures differs remarkably. Kessel and Kelley argue that in slipstream the focus is often on characters searching for specific truths or hoping to escape the alienation associated with modern life. LaValle and Brenner allow the mis en abyme, the story within the story, to create a mystery that engages the reader, provides historical insight, and reveals a communal truth. These embedded stories contrast with the violence in an urban setting and examine the complex role of community in providing some protection from the alienation of modern life. Big Machine features two embedded stories, one of which focuses on a black religious cult that suggests the failure of authoritative, organized religions and the need for inner spirituality. Oakland Tales also references black and Native religions and philosophies. That both LaValle’s and Brenner’s novels mention black religions and cults, a perhaps understudied phenomenon in American history, seems far from accidental.

Postmodern fables 91 The mis en abyme’s examination of less familiar black histories provides a more nuanced understanding of blackness than does simply relaying familiar black tropes. In his discussion of the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas notes how information is publicly transmitted and dictated based on what is commercially viable in such a way that news can become “in itself a commodity” (21). If, as Habermas explains, public information is composed of “residual elements” of larger, more expansive bodies of knowledge, then we have lost some of the knowledge that lacks the public authority of publication. Part of LaValle’s and Brenner’s projects involves reinserting this information by publishing it within their novels, but as stories within a story, which emphasizes how knowledge less useful to capitalism has been encapsulated into the private realm. Slipstream is “fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion” and echoes the Surrealists’ employment of bricolage, as slipstream borrows from diverse sources, including “history, journalism, official statements, advertising copy” and uses them as “raw material for collage work” (Sterling). AfroSurreal texts also make use of bricolage. LaValle and Brenner’s AfroSurreal novels also embrace bricolage while embodying some of slipstream’s most beloved qualities: irreverence, humor, and an interest in science, philosophy, and technology. LaValle and Brenner do more than thread slipstream elements through their work; their novels’ storytelling structures, like those of slipstream, borrow from genre fiction, primarily the detective novel and science fiction. LaValle and Brenner’s novels unfold, at a fast pace, with clues and information about black historical mysteries, but unlike slipstream, this knowledge is more purposeful than playful. Knowledge, in the AfroSurreal text, helps the protagonist gain resiliency and develop community. Slipstream invokes the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work often questioned the value of information, while Big Machine and Oakland Tales examine the reification and interpretation of culture, as well as the importance of cultural and historical artifacts, especially those that have been forgotten or deliberately obscured. These novels examine ideas that may be obscured, including histories of people of color, which have been left out of what Lyotard famously describes as the “grand narrative.” Perhaps, cultural memories can be retained and, to some extent, inherited, as recent research in epigenetics suggests. LaValle and Brenner argue for cultural practitioners able to share knowledge “in a systematic, continuous way” and suggest that doing so allows the black protagonist to cope with some of the psychological trauma associated with racial oppression (Scott 20). Big Machine and Oakland Tales deliberately reference misunderstood periods in black history, including black utopian movements, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Power movement. Although LaValle is biracial and Brenner is white, black culture remains at the core of both texts: Big Machine and Oakland Tales, like all AfroSurreal novels, feature black protagonists who undergo a crisis as a result of race-related oppression; further, both novels suggest the

92 Postmodern fables significance of “black knowledge” for healing, wholeness, and resisting racist cultural narratives. But what constitutes this knowledge? Amiri Baraka proposes “art is science because it is a form of knowing,” and Baraka’s statement implies that in some black cultures, artistic expression and scientific logic may be viewed as equally useful ways of interpreting the world (165). Ultimately, Big Machine and Oakland Tales reveal how the process of seeking out and interpreting hidden or misrepresented elements of black culture reunites the self, fosters community ties, and inspires joy. In other words, these texts suggest that a great deal of the pleasure in engaging with culturally specific art—such as reading an AfroSurreal novel or listening to hip-hop or jazz—arises from a spiritual reunion with repressed or disrupted cultural memories. Big Machine concerns itself with the ways in which knowledge has traditionally been segregated by race and class, while also arguing for reclaiming lost knowledge as a step towards reclaiming one’s identity. While the French Surrealists “widely embraced the Marxian critique of capitalism” (Armstrong), as I have suggested throughout this study, AfroSurreal texts occupy a more skeptical position, even while critiquing class inequality. The main characters of Big Machine are an African-American underclass, a “bunch of crackheads and criminals” (32). Disadvantaged by race and class, black “lumpenproletariat” is referred to as “Unlikely Scholars” once they are selected to research supernatural events at the mysterious institute known as the Washburn Library. Ricky, the novel’s protagonist, is an exheroin addict, and one of the most skeptical of the Unlikely Scholars. Ricky’s heroin addiction, along with his failure to become a father, has filled him with insecurity and a sense of “failure so deep it feels biological” (60). Ricky, when he first arrives at the Washburn Library and encounters other poor black people, recognizes their common struggle: [p]eople like us, poor folks I mean, we’re wise in some ways but in other ways we act like children. We can be a pretty docile bunch. I know you’re not supposed to say that, but … just go to any hospital emergency room in a broke neighbourhood … We slump and slouch for hours as we wait to be seen by a nurse practitioner, and a trained doctor is as rare as health benefits at our jobs. (42) Tellingly, it is less the research into supernatural events than the knowledge they glean about previous Unlikely Scholars, who were also black and poor, that inspires new self-confidence. As the contemporary Unlikely Scholars discover those from previous years, as they learn about the black man who heard the voice of God, they discover “a kind of joy even just in saying the names” of previous Unlikely Scholars (62). Most importantly, their new respect makes them anything but docile. By the end of the novel, Ricky believes “I can be brave” (339), and he is willing to face anything, including the Swamp Angels sent from God or Solomon Clay, the powerful but

Postmodern fables 93 misguided man who threatens to destroy the Washburn Library. And because Ricky believes that “[i]t’s hard to fake faith in yourself or anything else,” when readers finally see him question or challenge people in positions of power, his internal transformation seems genuine. Eldridge Cleaver’s “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party” explains how the “black Lumpen exists outside of the proletariat, extremely oppressed and has to create ‘its own forms of rebellion.’” Similarly, in Big Machine, we see the most oppressed members of American society develop “this aura, this zest” (67) from learning about their history, which, in turn, endows them with self-respect and allows them to rebel against authority. The AfroSurreal novel thus recalls the subversive acts found in a precursor to the contemporary AfroSurreal novel, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which was critical of leader-led movements, both black and white, but celebratory of the search for self-knowledge. With his claim that it is “very difficult” for black people to call themselves Marxist-Leninists or Christians, Cleaver argues for a black political and social revolution that exists outside of political or religious movements associated with Europeans. Big Machine, though invested in class struggle and spirituality, suggests a similar need for black revolutionary thought. Big Machine advocates for a black working class that questions and resists human authority, actively seeks answers (even if those answers are incorrect), and looks internally for spiritual truth and guidance. Through the Big Machine’s celebration of doubt and questioning, the novel reveals its greatest paradox: the act of seeking knowledge leads to selfrespect, regardless of whether the information itself is true. The black Christianity or spirituality obtained through Ricky’s own intuition and self-reflection ends up saving his life while the authority-driven, religious organizations of his childhood and adulthood nearly destroy it. Ricky grows up as one of the Washerwomen, a black religious cult that ends up murdering his sister and most of his childhood friends. Although Ricky manages to escape, he spends the rest of his life haunted by the Washerwomen massacre. The Washburn Library, though it appears to offer a sort of black utopia, is threatened by the character of Solomon Clay, whose first name is a nod to King Solomon, the wisest man in the bible, and whose surname references blackness—skin color—and false prophets with feet of clay. The Washerwomen and Clay are human beings who insist on a degree of obedience, ritual, and power. The Swamp Angels, on the other hand, appear almost randomly and look like “stingrays” (328) but are, in fact, angels that do God’s work. Big Machine makes an argument for putting faith not in human entities, but in an intuitive spirituality. Afrofutuist Ken McCloud locates spirituality, time travel, and immortality in the music of Sun Ra, hip-hop album titles (the Notorious BIG’s Life after Death and Born Again), and Tupac holograms. McCloud argues that this kind of spirituality represents “the collective unconscious,” as “[a]ctive audience participation” and that the use of cell phones (for recording images and sharing videos) are often part of the experience.

94 Postmodern fables Spirituality can be found in LaValle’s novel when Ricky becomes pregnant. Because Ricky is male, the implication is that Ricky either hallucinates or imagines his pregnancy, or his pregnancy is divine. While LaValle’s novel questions institutionalized religion (the Washerwomen), it suggests the power of organic, intuitive spirituality. Ricky raises the child with Adele Henry, which suggests the possibility for shared spiritual connections that allow black and other disempowered people to understand their internal power and avoid the oppression that arises from cults of personality. However, while Big Machine advocates that the black working class embraces an internal self-knowledge developed from reflection and intuition, the novel does not view empirical or rational knowledge as separate from black culture. Our cultural memories and spirits dwell within us, in our stories, and because nearly all of the stories Ricky encounters are relayed through black people, much of his knowledge is coded as “black.” The people who hear the voice of God are black, and the Washburn Library’s Dean tells Ricky that “[t]he American Negro finally got its god” (94). But this is a technology-centered God: Big Machine’s title alludes to God as the ultimate SuperComputer while the Unlikely Scholars’ research on the supernatural— they read and sort through hundreds of newspaper articles—mimics the work of an Internet search. The fact that Ricky references science—the ichneumon, a parasitic wasp—to describe how he is impregnated by a Swamp Angel (227) and hears the voice of God whose only word to him is “electricity” (301) also suggests a companionable relationship between science and spirituality. Ricky believes views of his most valuable discoveries, whether scientific or spiritual, arise from personal narratives—stories—about black people. Ricky claims that he has “never known a statistic that actually touched my heart” as he skims through an article on the Iraq war (72). But when the Dean of the Washburn Library tells Ricky about Judah Washburn, a former slave who heard the voice and founded the library, Ricky is motivated to undertake deeper, riskier research. Stories, Ricky demonstrates, transform us and lead us to action. The stories that galvanize Ricky are stories about black people that overcome obstacles, but part of Ricky’s confidence comes from the clothing he receives as an Unlikely Scholar; these clothes, like the newspaper articles he reads, tell a story. All of the Unlikely Scholars receive a wardrobe based on what the previous scholars wore. When Ricky receives his new wardrobe, it smells like “cigar smoke and history” (68), and he gains a certain pride in wearing it. In this way, Big Machine replicates a familiar theme—the individual’s search for knowledge and liberation— found in other African-American histories (Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Malcolm X). In these traditional African-American autobiographies and in Big Machine (a first-person novel that mimics the language and style of the autobiography), the search for knowledge and cultural memory is linked to self-respect.

Postmodern fables 95 The knowledge Ricky gains is complex and contradictory, but always coded black. This black cultural knowledge allows him to connect to Adele Henry, an Unlikely Scholar who becomes his wife. Yet, AfroSurrealism adds an additional dimension; the AfroSurreal text suggests how black knowledge, though it exists outside of mainstream culture, can bridge divides within the black community. Ricky and Adele’s growing understanding— and pride—in their black culture bridges the divide between them. One morning, in her cabin, Adele, a former prostitute, expresses to Ricky her surprise at being able selected to work at the Washburn Library: “When I got the invitation from the Library, I couldn’t get up there fast enough. And when they welcomed me, I just couldn’t believe it. A person like me” (302). In this same scene, Adele, for the first time, admits that though she has been “on my own” and “[l]ooking out for myself since forever,” she needs support (302). “I need men,” Adele Henry tells Ricky, but “[m]en are the ones who act like they don’t need me” (302). In response, Ricky, who has just realized that he feels “warmth” and “camaraderie” for an Unlikely Scholar whose reports he has read, tells Adele “It’s only an act” (302). Ricky and Adele’s ability to access and share their history has brought them closer, as they realize they both need their communities and each other. The AfroSurrealism movement suggests history and culture can provide psychological protections against the trauma of race and class oppression. Jada, the protagonist of Brenner’s Oakland Tales, lives in a poor neighborhood in West Oakland. Her father, Randy, is in prison, and her mother, Sharon, raises her alone, with some support from her mother. Jada’s life is difficult, and so are the lives of her peers. Jada’s brother through marriage, Ernesto, in an attempt to escape gang violence, moves from his home in East Oakland to Jada’s home in West Oakland. Jada and Ernesto’s lives possess a hermetic quality: Jada “almost never let West Oakland” (40) and Ernesto says he has never visited the East (71). Their limited knowledge of the outside world makes their eventual time travels with an older mystic, named Misty Horn, even more significant. Through Misty Horn’s name (“Misty” refers to spirituality and “Horn” to the Horn of Africa), Brenner suggests Afrofuturism, and the idea that science and spirituality can be compatible with a black/African worldview. Brenner also reveals Jada to be an independent, intellectually curious African-American girl who loves science. Jada’s teacher refers to her as “the most curious and perceptive student I’ve had in a long time” (43) and Jada is recommended for “a program at the Chabot Space and Science Center” (42). Brenner frames Jada’s mind as one that continuously seeks answers and is unafraid of truth, no matter how painful or upsetting. For instance, when Sharon lies to Jada about her father being in prison, and Jada’s own research uncovers the lie, Jada waits patiently “for her mother to tell the truth” (7). Jada’s belief in science and truth enables Brenner, early in the novel, to explore the idea that what seems fantastical—time travel—can

96 Postmodern fables also be compatible with science, “truth,” and blackness. Jada’s love for astronomy further illustrates the concept that what may seem strange or fantastical could exist as part of a broader, more obscured knowledge. As Jada explains to her cousin Maisha, “[a]stronomy is about the planets, stars, and galaxies. The big picture, bigger than what’s here on earth.” Jada’s words reveal the complex tensions embedded in AfroSurrealism: the history Jada learns from Misty Horn isn’t fiction, so much as a more expansive knowledge than what she has learned in school. Furthermore, the cultural knowledge that Jada receives from Misty Horn gives Jada the confidence to explore other subjects, including science. Misty Horn teaches Jada and Ernesto to time travel, and their adventures become a tour of Oakland’s history. Oakland Tales emphasizes the struggles of people of color and poor, working class communities, and although not all of the history Jada learns is “black history,” she does discover lesser known black histories, information, and epistemologies. Jada learns the precise black cultural knowledge that will allow her to flourish. Though this book is aimed at adolescents, even adults could be unaware of some of this history: the Mexican Revolution abolished slavery decades before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (111); West Oakland was known as the “Harlem of the West” (178); “Afro-Latinos settled in Alta Californisa” (111); “Pio Pico, the last Californio governor was Afro-Latino” (111). Tied to highly specific Oakland locales, our time travelers learn about not only less known facts about black culture, but also the diversity of the black experience, including black labor movements and Oakland’s role in supporting Pullman Porters (148) and black Indians (152). In her article, “Transracial Writing for the Sincere,” Nisi Shawl examines how people can write outside of their ethnicity or culture. Part of that writing, Shawl contends, requires a thoughtful examination of the culturally specific knowledge that exists outside of inauthentic “representations of minorities gleaned from popular culture.” Diversity exists within cultures, and Shawl reminds us that “[o]therness is not a uniform state. Non-whites are not identical, interchangeable units.” Brenner’s text examines the specificity of black cultural knowledge and argues for Oakland’s black community’s pluralism. As Jada is the novel’s protagonist, her knowledge prepares her to cope with the difficult events in her life: her father returns from prison and Ernesto is shot by a gang member. In essence, Jada gains present-day resilience from accessing cultural memories. The importance of history and cultural memory becomes most apparent in Chapter 25, when Jada, Ernesto, and Misty Horn travel back in time and meet the Black Panther Ruthie. When asked, Jada tells Ruthie that she’s “heard of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale,” (192) although she is unaware of the Panthers’ community. “Leaders,” Ruthie responds, “do not make a movement” (192). Jada learns that the Black Panthers’ legacy is more complicated than what she previously believed. Ruth tells Jada:

Postmodern fables 97 The Panthers run free breakfast sites for kids and a free health clinic in South Berkeley … .This is our free elementary school on East Fourteenth Street. On weekends, the school turns into a community center. Other groups meet here, like the Brown Beret … Besides talking the talk, we are walking the walk with other survival programs: educating and screening for sickle cell anemia, services for our elders, food giveaways, adult education classes, teen programs, legal aid, on and on. (197) Jada is inspired to make specific changes based on what she has learned in the past. When Misty Horn provides Jada with a glimpse into her future, we learn she succeeds in building an Oakland Community School, Star School (245) based on what she learned from Ruthie’s free school. While before her time travel trip, Jada enjoyed science, she never seriously considered pursuing a career in science. In the past, when Maisha cautions Jada to “keep the dream alive” and make it come true (20), Jada argues that “I dream I’m going to be something … [t]then I pinch myself. “Wake up, girl, you’re dreaming” (19). Through time travel and access to cultural memories, Jada realizes she shares the past is shared experience, composed of other people who struggled to achieve individual and collective dreams (272). Misty Horn reveals that Jada’s knowledge gives her the confidence to become “Jada Star Yates, Doctor of Astronomy” who has “worked on five continents, studied the universe, and made remarkable discoveries” (243). Jada is also empowered from understanding her community ties. Communal ties have been understood as the foundation for activism and emancipation. For example, Carol Hanisch has argued small communal groups can provide avenues for fortifying mental health and serve as sources for political action: “There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” Paula Giddings suggests that the communal-centered and nonhierarchical structure of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as opposed to other civil rights organizations, not only “propelled women into the forefront of the struggle” but also allowed to “move beyond the operational methods and perspectives of older civil rights groups” (277). Giddings, who contrasts black women’s work in other organizations such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), reveals a truth in Brenner’s novel: the interplay between personal and collective struggles. Jada is a young black woman, but her community provides her with opportunities, roots. Jada’s community ties and their effect on Jada’s health are evident. The journey Jada experiences with Misty Horn bring her genuine joy: “Once Jada started to help, she couldn’t stop smiling. She was no longer afraid” (156). Although readers see more of Jada’s future transformation as the protagonist, it is Ernesto who explains the importance of cultural memories: “When my parents came to Oakland, their world turned upside down.

98 Postmodern fables They lost their points of reference. It was hard for them to read the world.” Ernesto’s words to Jada and Misty Horn show how people can become unmoored without access to their culture (99). This demonstrates how history can allow a young generation to re-navigate the present, especially under difficult or complicated circumstances. But Brenner makes it clear that the specificity of cultural memory matters. While Jada meets an actual family member—the wife of her great-great uncle (147)—Ernesto experiences history in a slightly more general way; he learns of the Oakland community, but does not meet family. This detail suggests that Jada is perhaps better prepared to face the hardships of modern life because her experience has been so specific and contains so much emotional resonance. Still, Brenner’s detailed appendix examines the “forgotten” histories of Oakland— including the Ohlone Indians, the Chinese, the Japanese internment camps, the San Francisco Fire in 1906 and how it affected poor people and people of color—emphasizes that for Brenner, all cultural and historical memory has lasting importance. While the ideal may be learning both the history of one’s community and one’s family, learning alternative histories that disrupt racist master-narratives can still lead to greater self-confidence and satisfaction with life. While slipstream and other “neo-avant-garde” movements have been interested in information and in “typography, photography, film, video, holography, radio, electronic sound-processing … Internet, programming code” (Block 345), the knowledge associated with black culture hasn’t been fully integrated into autonomous art. Far from being submerged within bourgeois culture or completely outside of it, AfroSurreal art maintains an intersecting and disruptive tension. As Coco Fusco has suggested of black art, cultural and communal self-expression are perhaps more important sites of resistance. Yet resistance within a colonial context is rarely direct, overt, or literal; rather it articulates itself through semantic reversals and through the process of infusing icons, objects, and symbols with different meanings. (35) Big Machine and Oakland Tales focus on cultural knowledge rather than racial physiognomy. That is, LaValle and Brenner rarely reference their protagonists’ skin tone or other racial characteristics. Instead, LaValle and Brenner weave AfroSurreal themes into their work through multiple intertextual allusions to African-American history and literature, both oral and written, and reveal how cultural and historical knowledge also determine blackness. Toni Morrison has remarked that “it does not ‘go without saying’ that a work written by an Afro-American is automatically subsumed by an enforcing Afro-American presence” (“Unspeakable”). One could argue that cultural knowledge—and a black protagonist—is necessary for the AfroSurreal text, as LaValle and Brenner reveal knowledge coded as black as

Postmodern fables 99 part of what produces a black identity. LaValle even emphasizes the ambiguous nature of blackness by referring to Adele Henry, Ricky’s love interest, as the “Gray Lady”—Adele has white or prematurely gray hair— for almost half of the novel. Brenner’s Misty Horn’s physical body emphasizes both whiteness and blackness; he has an “orbit of cotton-white hair” and “penetrating black eyes” (85). Adele and Misty Horn are perhaps the most emotionally resilient characters in their respective novels, and their physical descriptions suggest that black-coded knowledge may be more valuable or a better indicator of one’s ability to navigate a racially oppressive system than one’s physiognomy. People, LaValle and Brenner argue, know what they know in order to survive, and black-coded knowledge that combines intuition, science, technology, and history may be just what we need to maintain emotional health and survive in an oppressive society. Works cited Armstrong, Amanda. “The Politics of Surrealism.” Solidarity. www.solidarity-us.org/node/ 2438l. Baraka, Amiri. “Technology & Ethos. [vol. 2 Book of Life].” Raise Rage Rays Raze: Essays since 1965. Random House, 1971. www.marilynnance.com/titanic/baraka.html. Block, Friedrich W. “Movens” or the Aesthetic Movement of a Neo-Avant-Garde Art, edited by David Hopkinson and Anna Katharina Schaffner. https://epdf.pub/neo-avant-garde-avantgarde-critical-studies-20.html. Brenner, Summer. Oakland Tales: Lost Secrets of the Town. Oakland: Community Works West, 2014. Cleaver, Eldridge. Target Zero, edited by Kathleen Cleaver. St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Dillon, Grace L. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012. Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations in Afro-Futurism.” The New Centennial Review. Vol. 3, No. 2, 2003, pp. 287–302. Frelik, Pawel. “Slipstream 101.” SFRA Review. Vol. 290, Fall 2009, pp. 3–6. Fusco, Coco. English Is Broken Here. New Press, 1995. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter. Morrow and Company, 1984. Habermas, Jürgen. “Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere.” The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT Press, 1991, pp. 1–14. Hanisch, Carol. “The Personal Is Political.” The Personal Is Political: The Women’s Liberation Movement Classic with a New Explanatory Introduction. Carol Hanish, 2009. www.carolha nisch.org. Keene, John. Annotations. New Directions, 1995. Kelly, Patrick James and John Kessel. Feeling Very Strange. Tachyon, 2006. LaValle, Victor. Big Machine. Spiegel, 2009. McDonald, Stefan. “A Historical Perspective: How a Positive Cultural Identity Can Increase Achievement Motivation and Self-Esteem in Young African American Students.” Master’s Thesis. State University of New York College, 2007. McLeod, Ken. “Hip Hop Holograms.” Afrofuturism 2.0, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. Lexington Books, 2016.

100 Postmodern fables Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/m/morrison90.pdf. Patterson, Kelly L. “A Longitudinal Study of African American Women and the Maintenance of a Healthy Self-Esteem.” Journal of Black Psychology. Vol. 30, No. 3, August 2004, pp. 307–328. Shawl, Nisi. “Transracial Writing for the Sincere.” SWFA. www.sfwa.org/2009/12/transracialwriting-for-the-sincere/.

5

Horror and immortality in Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer, Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids, and Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound

Nalo Hopkinson’s introduction to Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer remarks upon Due’s work as “simultaneously unflinching and humorous” as in the mode of “the best horror” it “gazes calmly at the fragility of life” (9). Hopkinson’s introduction is remarkable, not least because Due and Hopkinson are both established writers whose speculative fiction incorporates elements of horror, but also because these writers have done so in beautifully compressed forms: novellas and short stories. Accomplished poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths similarly conveys horror’s capacity for revealing (and teasing out) memory through perhaps an even more distilled form: the photograph. Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound offers an image, both surreal and haunted, that suggests collective and individual memory as generative (and capable of producing a holistic self ), or as thoroughly destructive and an apparatus for making unresolved antinomies more apparent. The self—for Due, Hopkinson, and Griffiths—travels and is released through time-compressed horrors revealing collective and individual anxieties. Further, if researchers have found trauma distorts our sense of time,1 then perhaps constructing meaning in condensed forms (novellas, short stories, and photographs as opposed to novels and films) intensifies an already distorted sense of temporality and allows an emotionally and historically distant event to seem more present-centered. The works I wish to explore, Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer, Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids, and Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound employ compressed forms—the novella, short story, and photograph—to compellingly investigate memory. Yet in these works, which conjure elements of horror and the supernatural, the protagonists enter trauma at different moments within the text. But why? Due, Hopkinson, and Griffith have invested in the psychology of memory, how people assimilate collective and individual memories to form what we think of as a “self ”: Due’s Ghost Summer features the eponymous (and AfroSurreal) novella Ghost Summer and the short story “The Lake,” which examine psychological resilience through an understanding of community, history, or a return to a distant past—one not embedded in the protagonist’s consciousness. Hopkinson’s “Herbal” and “Delicious Monster”—stories from Falling in Love with Hominids—position (individual and

102 Horror collective) memories as foci of the self. With stories that begin in medias res or purposefully blur lines between past and future, Hopkinson’s storytelling extenuates or spirals memory, creating clusters of fragmented, unresolved selves. For Hopkinson, speculative fiction reveals how our lives are shadowed by memories, particularly those evoking the natural environment and its chaos. Due and Hopkinson, by writing in abbreviated forms—the novella and the short story—introduce another psychological element: a heightened sense of time’s passage. Griffiths similarly manipulates time; her photograph, Woman after Her Last Wound, forces the brain to assemble, to visually accommodate complex and sometimes counterintuitive ideas about the self. Griffiths suggests memory as a leaking container, a past which unavoidably spills onto the viewer, as the immediacy of a photograph forces gestalt, a simultaneous reconciliation of past and present, and dissolves notions of an individualized self. Due, Hopkinson, and Griffiths allow their storytelling, variously informed by AfroSurrealism or Indigenous science, to reveal tensions underlying the formation of “the self ” and the capacity of collective and individual memories to facilitate healing—or unresolved memories to reveal the splintered self. Tananarive Due: revisiting and assimilating selves through horror In earlier chapters, I discussed how a network of Black science fiction, included under Reynaldo Anderson’s term Afrofuturism 2.0, provides different strategies for resisting hegemonic thinking or oppressive behaviors. Hortense Spillers’ groundbreaking essay “The Idea of Black Culture” offers, possibly, a pathway for understanding struggle and combating psychological violence associated with oppression, while suggesting the role of aesthetic movements included within Black culture[s], including variations of Afrofuturism 2.0: Animist realism, as described by Harry Garuba, as forging avenues for celebrating and understanding African-centered philosophical and spiritual traditions; and a broad sense of Afrofuturism as probing environmental, gendered, and socio-economic concerns complicated and often implemented through racial constructions. Due’s short story collection Ghost Summer is situated within mostly southern communities and provides an understanding of the histories and contemporary structures underlying these communities’ existence. Divided into four sections (“Gracetown,” “The Knowing,” “Carriers,” and “Vanishings”), Due’s Ghost Summer includes eleven short stories and the eponymously titled novella. In the Gracetown section, Due reinforces how Gracetown’s geography, its small town southern location, marks it as both inside and outside of mainstream America’s concepts of time. Southerners are known to talk more slowly, as demonstrated by the often disparaged southern drawl. Civil rights also came later to this part of the country: schools were infamously separate but unequal, and strict social divides remained well after the 1960s—as recently as 2014, Georgia’s Wilcox County High School held its first integrated prom. But while the South maintains outdated customs and beliefs,

Horror 103 Due demonstrates how this past was based on false mythologies: an imagined past based on constructions of blackness, whiteness, and womanhood that never actually existed. The black characters in Due’s short fiction work to disrupt—and often critique—linear conceptions of time, and instead, suggest cycles and overlapping, symbiotic intersections of past, present, and future. While the Ghost Summer stories aren’t linked and don’t feature the same characters, they investigate similar themes and occasionally share settings; “The Lake,” the first story in the collection, provides an understanding of Gracetown, Florida, as it appears in the title story, “Ghost Summer.” In “The Lake,” which follows teacher and child predator Abbie LaFleur as she seduces adolescent boys, we learn of Gracetown’s North Florida location. Gracetown’s proximity to the Tallahassee airport suggests modernity even as Due establishes Gracetown as a place of stillness, one steeped in history, a near-mythical space not entirely penetrated by the contemporary. “The Lake” also indicates one way Due generates the uncanny—by invoking dolls: Gracetown is a town of “harmless little dollhouses” situated within an “anonymous subdivision” (14). Ernst Jentsch’s and Sigmund Freud’s seminal essays on the uncanny explore, respectively, the role of dolls and sight in producing an uncanny effect. Due’s exploration of doll imagery and illusion serves as a reminder of untimely deaths (a doll’s painted features could resemble those of a corpse), a very real possibility in a south often hostile and violent towards black bodies. From the start of this collection, Due allows the loss of sight to produce uncanny effects, not by suggesting the eye as representing “the male organ,” or “the fear of going blind” as a form of the castration complex, as does Freud, but by reminding readers of the limitations of sight (938). Sight, Due reminds readers, is insufficient for interpreting racial identity, even as racial oppression continues to produce physical and mental health problems and limit economic opportunities. Due’s “The Lake” establishes the south as a site of racial ambiguity: Abbie’s employers are unable to determine “whether Abbie had ancestry in Haiti or Martinique to explain her sun-kissed complexion and the curly brown hair” while Derek, Abbie’s student, has “jet-black hair” that whispered “Native American or Latino heritage” (17–19). Also the suggestion of blackness or racial otherness disrupts linear time and conventions by violating rules about the lines delineating childhood from adulthood. Due’s text (rightly) repositions children of color as children, asserts their right to innocence and protection, and signals an awareness that, in many communities, children of color are viewed as physically more mature and less vulnerable than other children.2 Throughout “The Lake,” Due hints that Abbie sees Derek as older, even though he is the same age as his classmates. Abbie, who is “careful about which students she invited to her home,” singles out Derek, and both Derek’s unusual maturity and good looks are linked to his darkness. Derek is “used to being stared at,” and Derek’s darkness seems to be the source of his attractiveness; Abbie’s description of Derek includes the word “dark” or

104 Horror synonyms for dark (“black,” “olive complexion”) five times while other physical features (“crater-sized dimple,” “body angled, leg crossed at the knee”) are mentioned only twice (19). This darkness is then linked to maturity; Abbie notices Derek’s “dark eyes” just as she claims “Sixteen … a good age. A mature age” (19). But Derek is still a child. Abbie’s inability to see Derek as a child is, of course, because she’s a predator, but her statement, surrounded by descriptions of Derek’s racial otherness, implies racial difference provides “the spark of maturity she needed” (19). Abbie’s willingness to connect racial otherness with sexual maturity is also demonstrated through her choice of friends. When Abbie reflects sympathetically on “Mary Kay,” a “friend” and fellow teacher who had been “vilified and punished” for her marriage to a boy, the reader realizes “Mary Kay” is an allusion to Mary Katherine Schmitz. Schmitz is a white woman who sexually assaulted and then married a twelve-year-old boy of color, her SamoanAmerican student Vili Fualaau. The power dynamics between Schmitz, who wasn’t required to register as a sex offender, and Fualaau are replicated in “The Lake,” as Abbie, like Schmitz, appears to have more economic privilege than her victim.3 In a ruse for getting Derek to her home, Abbie offers to pay him twenty dollars a day, a payment he splits with his cousin, Jack, to do yard work and home repairs; the money Abbie realizes is “hardly pay” (25). Though Abbie is a woman of color, her willingness to replicate the physical and sexual exploitation of children has genuine historical precedent. Many children of color were once part of the south’s unpaid labor force, and as such, had fewer opportunities to play and live freely as children. “The Lake” and “Ghost Summer,” (and also “The Vanishing,” which takes place in Atlanta and closes the collection) argue against the community’s refusal to see children of color as children, as “[s]omeone’s dear son” or daughter, and suggests, through terrible confrontations with an untameable environment (the swamp), the trauma associated with physically or emotionally abusing children (28). In “The Lake,” the Floridian swamp serves as the site of implied rapes while in “Ghost Summer,” situated in a more explicitly historical context, the swamp becomes a metaphor for children of color’s pain. (Floridian history includes rumors of black children being used as alligator bait; several websites contain racist cartoons of alligators trying to consume black children4). Due’s “The Lake” ends with Abbie either splintering into a new self—or allowing her actual self to become real—as she, after a few swims (metaphorically or literally), forms gills, scales, and becomes the swamp’s sea monster. In the story’s final scenes, after Jack and Derek have been painting her porch, Abbie invites the two boys to go skinny-dipping, and as they enter the lake, she swims and the “water massages her gills” as she moves towards “her giant meal” (27). During these moments, it’s unclear if Abbie has literally turned into a sea creature who will literally devour first Jack and later Derek, or if Abbie’s physical changes (“the new size of her feet” and strange cravings “for all

Horror 105 things rare, or raw”) are to be read as a metaphor for pregnancy (Due makes it clear Abbie is “of childbearing age”) and her plan to “overpower Derek” as a metaphor for rape (15, 24–28). Through Abbie, Due introduces the idea of submerged truths (violence, abuse, pain) embedded in the community and symbolically and literally devoured by the swamp. Abbie’s ruptured self is a result of her inability to understand these truths and support the community, instead of preying on it. For instance, Abbie, “an outsider, a third-generation Bostonian,” ignores or mocks the local folklore to “never, ever go swimming in Gracetown’s lakes in the summer,” even though this advice carries historical and valuable wisdom: an alligator-filled lake or swamp may be more dangerous in the summer, than in the winter, as the alligators would bromate during that season. Abbie, in effect, as she prepares to attack Jack, has transformed into an alligator-like creature (“Derek would … try to rescue him from what he would be sure was a gator”) and her “new body” recalls, perhaps without her being aware of it, generations of racist imagery of the swamp as a continuous source of dangerous creatures and terror for children of color (28). Jack, whose race is ambiguous—his skin is “sprayed with endless freckles” but dark-skinned people can have freckles, and he and Derek, who has been labeled dark, are both described as “ruddy” and “sun-broiled”—is often disassociated from darkness (25). Abbie deemphasizes Jack’s darkness even though it’s possible Jack is of color, by describing his belly as “large and pale,” and for Abbie, this paleness also links him with immaturity; she pays close attention to Jack’s “awkward baby fat” (27). While collective and individual memories have the ability to restore the self, Abbie invokes myths about history and her predatory behavior that leave her, at the end of the story, dissociated from a sense of self, in a fugue state, and lost in a nightmarish dream space. As Abbie advances towards Jack, she dissociates and sees her movements occurring “exactly like a dream” (27). And in these moments before Abbie possibly devours or rapes Jack, Due switches from past tense to future conditional tense verbs (“she would claw the boy’s belly open … his scream would sound muffled”), highlighting the role of memory, both collective and individual, in helping us understand and create our futures. The historical memories that could have brought Abbie understanding have been infiltrated by her individual, ego-centered myths. Before Abbie violates Jack, either metaphorically or literally, a “beautiful fireball of light” offers Abbie a reminder of larger, more expansive memories, “a reminder of a different time, another way” and she tries to suppress the urge to “claw the boy’s belly open” (27). But Abbie has allowed her own narcissism to intersect with truthful, communal memories. Abbie argues, as she prepares to attack Jack, that “in ancient times, or in other cultures, a boy Jack’s age would already have a wife,” but she ignores the honest communal memory: in these other “ancient times” and “other cultures,” Jack’s wife would be roughly the same age as him, or younger, rather than twenty-two years older. Abbie continuously discounts

106 Horror communal history in order to replicate the worst aspects of the past; Due links Abbie’s home, refurbished by Derek’s back-breaking labor, to plantation imagery, as Derek “transformed” Abbie’s home “from an eyesore to a snapshot of the quaint Old South” (25). But the Old South isn’t always “quaint”; we learn that Abbie lives in the McCormack plantation, which in “Ghost Summer” serves as the site of at least one mass murder, with black men who “were rounded up and taken to McCormack’s place” and “shot down right there in the muck” (85). Abbie’s rejection of communal histories, in favor of her own self-indulgent myths, results in a divided self that tries “in her new body … to resist the overpowering scent of a meal and remember that he was a boy” even as she hungers for him (28). Perhaps, “The Lake” is an allegory and we’re meant to read Abbie’s “hunger” as sexual, and the depiction of her newly webbed feet or gills as a psychosis spurred by violating communal taboos; it’s hard to tell, when the other characters don’t comment on Abbie’s physical transformation. Still, Due implies that what gives Abbie “pause” as she begins to attack Jack and Derrek is that “reminder of a different time,” perhaps those stories, those memories, which she can’t remember (“was that the other one’s name”) could bring her back to wholeness. After all, while “Gracetown had learned to keep its stories to itself,” Due suggests perhaps the town should share these stories to protect those who have yet to be “tested by life” (28). “The Lake” sets the stage for several of Due’s themes, but “Ghost Summer” provides the collection’s most AfroSurreal elements; Due often appraises memory and communal attachments through strange AfroSurreal moments that teeter between shared “realities” and a personal, imaginary space. This psychological wavering occurs throughout the novella, and in order for Due’s protagonist to maintain a balanced self, he must negotiate the sometimes blurred lines between reality, the imagination, and the extraordinary—and master these tasks (along with his own personal traumas) while still a child. “Ghost Summer” centers on twelve-year-old Kofi Davie Stephens and his visit to his grandparents home in Gracetown, Florida, as his parents consider divorce after twenty years of marriage. Davie, who rejects his first name because “the other kids called him Coffee and tried to pick fights,” must decide which cultural memories and identities he should claim, as his mother wants to live with her “family in Ghana” and his father, a California-based filmmaker, is “All-American” (51). Davie celebrates Kwanzaa and Christmas and has adapted spiritual beliefs and philosophical values from both parents (52–69). Davie looks forward to visiting his grandparents, in large part, because of the possibility of seeing ghosts, a belief he shares with his Ghanian-raised mother, who says of ghosts, “they lived in the acacia trees. They sang us to sleep!” (52). Still, while Davie’s father, Darryl, claims not to believe in ghosts and Davie’s mother says she does, Due continuously blurs the lines of who believes what. Due describes how although Darryl sees himself as rational, he believes in a psychic’s prediction that “his parents would die when he was young—and he’d lived in

Horror 107 fear of losing them since” (55). Further, while Davie’s mother claims to believe in ghosts, when Darryl aids Davie in his ghost hunt, she then sees her husband as mentally unstable and decides to interrupt Davie’s vacation. Davie’s mom, despite her eagerness to visit Ghana after a long absent—and a parent’s death—travels from Ghana to Florida (“Mom was on her way”) to “rescue” Davie and his sister Neema from their dad and end their vacation “a month early” (118). Ghost Summer’s compression—the novella is much shorter than the average novel—adds to the uncanny effects. Freud famously remarked that repetition generates the uncanny; Due’s use of multiple repeated images in a short space compounds their power, by allowing the reader to understand a series of splintered identities and Davie’s attempt to bridge them. Due’s novel allows the reader to encounter multiple separations: the separation of reality from the imaginary as represented by a “broken” fence; the separation of life from death through the repetition of dolls; suppressed cultural memories as manifested by water (63–104). Due’s culturally aware horror purposefully returns to these separations to make an argument for cultural memory and its ability to preserve and resurrect the self. Black horror scholar Robin R. Means Coleman has argued that horror can provide a rich exploration of horror; Means Coleman explains “Black horror films” as “race films” that investigate “Black culture, history, ideologies, experience, politics, language, humor, aesthetics, style, music” (7). Yet mainstream horror, Means Coleman argues, had a different purpose. In a discussion of 1980s horror, during the era of “white flight” to the suburbs, Means Coleman contends that black people were largely absent from such films as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, which featured whiteness, specifically, the “supernatural suburban White male,” as the threat to white suburban comfort and safety (229). Means Coleman reminds us that while the media regulated blacks to the cities or urban spaces—the sites of “poorly equipped” schools, “murder and drug distribution,” defiant and intractable children, and criminality—and excluded blacks from white suburban-centered horror, other people of color also faced “symbolic annihilation” (226–231). Films such as Amityville Horror, The Shining, and Poltergeist showed “housing developments” or hotels being built on top of “ancient Indian burial grounds” (231–232). In these horror movies, the focus is on the loss of white safety, security. Due’s Ghost Summer, by repositioning the gaze—a black family, Davie, his sister Neema, and his father Darryl—end up searching for ghosts, and then, discovering the story of the three Timmons boys, and their bodies and the lost or unidentified bones of members of the black community. As a result of this experience, Davie develops a deeper connection with history and begins to realize a more mature self. Ghost Summer is actually based on historical truths; in an epilogue to the story, Due writes that she

108 Horror received a call from the Florida Attorney General’s office, informing me that my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, had an uncle, Robert Stephens, who probably was among dozens of children buried on the grounds of … a reform school in Marianna, Florida … months later, my father, husband, son, and I would go to the excavation site in the woods in Marianna…[and sift] through soil in search of bones. (127) Still, while Due investigates an actual phenomenon that occurred in the south—mass, unmarked graves—she enfolds strange or extraordinary moments into history. Lynchings and mass terror actually occurred in the years after slavery, and journalist Ida B. Wells, in 1892, a year when mobs killed “more than 200 African-American men and women, including one of Wells’s closest friends,” led the famous investigator to begin reporting lynchings (Feimster). The Rosewood, Florida, massacre took place in 1923 and resulted in the deaths of six blacks and two whites (Bentley). Due sets the Timmons brothers’ death in between these horrific tragedies; in 1909, the Timmons brothers die, Davie learns, not as result of a lynching but the implication of one. Isaac Timmons, the family patriarch, has a hostile relationship with Old Man McCormick, a white man who resents his black neighbor for “doin’ better’n most niggers” during the era (89). McCormick is prejudiced, but that isn’t the point. Due demonizes neither McCormick nor his ancestors as the focus remains on the black characters, how the everyday actions and emotions associated with black childhood are restricted (confined) by potential violence. Strange or supernatural moments reveal these characters’ psychological states and connects the past characters to the contemporary. Due explores what may have happened in a Floridian town during the era, and dives the narrative between the 1909 past and a contemporary era “haunted” by that past. Ultimately, Ghost Summer is less concerned with providing an alternative history than with examining how the self becomes whole and integrated through an understanding of communal histories and memories. One way Due describes how the self becomes whole is by revealing what is broken; an open gaping fence symbolizes the boundaries between the psychological or the supernatural, and the real; the characters of the past and the characters of the present; and the world of childhood versus the one of adolescence. Due’s open fence prepares the reader for the connections between the past- and present-day characters, parallels she sets up from the very beginning, by describing Davie’s trip from California to Gracetown: The weeks in summer usually fly by, but the two days before they would leave for Florida passed as slowly as the last two days of school. The day of the trip passed even more slowly. First, the flight itself was endless. One plane to Atlanta took forever [ … ] The next plane was so

Horror 109 teeny that they climbed up metal stairs from the hot armac in the rain, and Dad had to stow his computer case because the attendants said there wouldn’t be room. (53) Davie’s “endless” and cramped flight suggests lengthy, but far more treacherous, journeys made by his ancestors, and by the Timmons brothers— Isaac, Scott, and Little Eddie, who travel, first, through a terror-filled Gracetown night, and later, through time and space. While the Timmons brothers don’t speak directly to Davie and Neema, they can be seen and heard by both children (but not by adults). As Davie and Neema follow the Timmons’ brothers ghosts and learn of their story, the fence, open in both the past and present tense narratives, emphasizes connections with the past and the present. Davie learns that Isaac Timmons, Sr. thinks Old Man McCormack has burned down his barn, when, in fact, his own children have done so accidentally. The children don’t tell Timmons the truth about the barn even though “Isaac wanted to tell the truth as soon as he saw how scared is father was of McCormack but he couldn’t make his mouth work” (90). Timmons believes McCormack has, through this show of violence, threatened his family, and the Timmons family decides to leave town. The night the family is supposed to leave, Isaac wants to say goodbye to his girlfriend, and as they travel past McCormack land, they end up getting chased by McCormack’s dog into a swamp—a chase made possible because “an entire section” of “the McCormack fence” was “crushed,” freeing the “monstrous beast”—and then falling to their deaths into a cellar. The Timmons children had the same desires many children do: to avoid their parents’ anger, to spend time with their crushes. Yet their normal desires result in overwhelming tragedy: not only do the Timmons children lose their lives, but when they don’t return home, their father believes McCormack has killed them, and wielding a gun, threatens him. This results in an execution of other black men: the town’s social order is disrupted when a black man threatens a white one, and they restore it with violence. (Due makes it clear the story’s violence isn’t improbable and is suggested by actual historical events; Essie Timmons, the Timmons brothers’ sister, is a quasi-anagram of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black child lynched for whistling at a white woman.) As Neema and Davie chase after the ghosts, they learn this history, a history that matures them and makes them a little more prepared to face adversity. In the 1909 narrative, the fence unleashed the terror of the McCormack dog and precipitated a dangerous nightly chase; in the contemporary narrative, the fence similarly forces Neema and Davie to confront life and death. During the children’s chase after the Timmons boys’ ghosts, they “eventually ended up at the broken fence” which symbolizes the end of childhood: “[t]he sight of the broken fence in the frame scared Davie. Once they left the backyard, all of the light would be behind them” (105). The light suggests childhood and its safety, the safety

110 Horror of their backyard, is “behind them” (105). And while the novella references the fence in the past and present narratives, the setting is always Gracetown, Florida. The name “Gracetown” then becomes symbolic—who, in this community, is allowed innocence, granted grace? Potential death—and being frozen in time—are symbolized through Neema’s dolls. During visits to their grandparents’ Gracetown home, Neema sleeps in the “doll room,” where “shelf after shelf of brown and black and white dolls, most of them babies dressed like it was baptism day, frozen in infancy” (64). The dolls are both creepy and sad; they suggest the idea of not leaving childhood, of staying “frozen” in one place. Further, while walking through this “empty room with too many dolls,” Davie momentarily loses Neema, and wonders if “a ghost dog,” the same one that chased the Timmons boys, “dragged Neema into another realm” (65). Due repeatedly shows how Davie links the dolls with death and immortality, as Davie notes how “Raggedy-Ann looked thrown against the door, head lolling, legs akimbo”; how dolls can go from “from looking ridiculous to sinister in a blink” (63–69). Part of what makes dolls so sinister is that their features cast in perpetual innocence, but dressed in the fashion of the era they were created, and they seem a representation of life interrupted, a young person’s premature death. The AfroSurreal text incorporates historical counternarratives into present-day settings in order to allow readers to better understand historical traumas. Historicalized fictions face a burden of exploring history in a nonexploitative manner, AfroSurreal scholar Terri Francis reminds us, and should consider “the factual accuracy on which an ethical, rational, and compassionate historiography relies” (43–45). At the core of the Ghost Summer trauma is the idea community can provide healing, love, and a form of resurrection—if the characters retain a fidelity to historical truths or accuracy. In this way, several of the stories in Ghost Summer are AfroSurreal, which explores less discussed histories. Gabriel Saldías, in an explanation of Ernst Bloch’s and Ruth Levitas’ work on memory, argues anamnesis (considering the past as simply “historical facts”) differs from anagnorisis in that the latter describes memory’s ability to shape the present (403–404). Both AfroSurrealism, and its literary cousin, steam funk, have the potential to engage anagnorisis. Steam funk, developed by writers such as Andrea Hairston, whose award-winning Redwood and Wildfire contains an Oscar Micheaux-like character, and best-selling authors Milton Davis and Balogun Ojetade, editors of the anthology Steamfunk! argue for historical untrustworthiness and exploiting the mythologies associated with mainstream histories by inventing new histories—or intercepting the old ones. AfroSurrealism draws attention to how less discussed or even ignored histories continue to have an effect on our present. Both AfroSurrealism and steam funk are problem-posing storytelling conventions; they simply pose different problems. The steam funk narrative seems more likely to question the usefulness of memory, as alternative realities, as opposed to a supernatural

Horror 111 element, revise dominant historical narratives. In AfroSurrealism, repressed historical memories offer a means of understanding the self; in Ghost Summer, memories associated with water are most dominant and provide deeper and more holistic understandings of the self. Water appears more than any other metaphor in Ghost Summer. A “shimmering sheen of water” announces the presence of the ghosts of the Timmons boys and the McCormick dog while “shimmering” tears accompany Davie’s mother’s departure to Ghana (51–72). Water is, of course, something tangible and familiar in Davie and Neema’s everyday world; towards the end of the story they “drank bottled water” and Neema has even had swimming lessons (75–115). Still, the swamp water that begins to fill their grandparents’ living room is strange and different and a water only children can feel (“it was so cold”) and smell (“smelled like the water in the fish-tank … like old rotting plants and leaves”) (72). So connected with both the mundane contemporary world and the ghost world, this water, Davie explains, “was real but it wasn’t” even as it wets his “ankles” and “spattered” his chest (72–73). When the adults decide to accompany the children on a ghost hunt, the adults claim they “don’t feel any water,” and that they “were promised ghost water, and I expect ghost water,” even as the water, for the children, grows “deeper” and “colder” (94–95). The reason the children may be able to experience the water while the adults do not is that the children are open to multiple ways of understanding history and culture. Initially only one adult, notably a librarian, with a deep knowledge and appreciation of the town’s histories, “would hold still and listen” as Davie “talked about ghosts” (83). Akasha Gloria Hull describes how “communication with the physically dead is very much a part of African and African American culture” (59). Throughout Ghost Summer, Due suggests, as Darryl (who hesitates between belief and disbelief) does, that the ghost hunt has historical significance. The ghost hunt says Darryl is a “[v]aluable exercise in imagination, and how working through the scenario would help them understand the region’s history … the whole history of black America” (97). Davie, who has seen water “flow backward,” recognizes the ghosts and the accompanying water’s importance. Davie honors the ghosts and believes that “if we don’t listen to them, nobody else can. We can follow their voices” (97). Although following the Timmons is a physically strenuous activity, Due reveals the ghost hunt engenders a mental and emotional strain that produces what psychologists refer to as post-traumatic growth. Davie, who manages to convince his father to go on a ghost-hunt with Neema and him, realizes he has to grow up “fast” (109); Darryl, the father who had become distraught at his wife’s separation, learns to be less self-absorbed. Due allows water to help us consider the “reality” of our experiences: Dad and grandpa cannot tell if the children are imagining the water or if the water is “real” as they watch “with fascination” as “Davie and his sister shook invisible droplets of water from their fingers” (95). Either way, the

112 Horror adults see the effect of the water, of cultural memories. What becomes important, Due suggests, is how memories have resonance and the ability to shape the way we experience the world and ourselves. Davie hopes “dad wouldn’t start forgetting” and become “convinced there had never been a dog, that maybe they had been attacked by a hungry bear in the dark” (119). Ghost Summer clarifies the role of memory, both collective and individual, in forming the self. Ambiguity clouds the characters’ interpretations of what happens in the novella, but the water remains constant, an instrument, as Ta-Nehisi Coates famously reminds us, for thinking about memory. Due’s narrative implies a, perhaps, counterintuitive perspective—children as preservers of history. At the end of the story, the community comes together, and, based on what Davie has told them about the Timmons brother, has a dig that “swelled to at least sixty, with yet more planning to come and watch the spectacle during their lunch breaks” (122). Darryl considers moving “to Ghana” to be with his wife (125), and even though Davie will be haunted by his experience (he wonders how “he would ever sleep again”), Due offers hope: in the novella’s last few sentences, she shows Davie integrating all of these ideas, while feeling optimistic about his first crush and experiencing “his face blush for the first time in his life” (127). In the confined space of the novella, Ghost Summer’s exploration of time travel has a specific purpose: to reference historical realities in contemporary situations, and in doing so, provide new insight into historical moments that need to be reexamined. Because this historical investigation happens within the context of a novella, this exploration of temporality complicates existing ideas about race and class and forces a psychological reckoning within the reader: the mental processes required to immerse oneself in a short narrative traversing multiple dimensions of time alter the reader’s conception of past and present. I argue the abbreviated length of a short story or novel can allow events set in the past to “feel” more immediate and visceral. Water thus becomes Due’s most compelling symbol for examining temporal fluidity. Hopkinson’s delicious monster(s): exploring indigenous science and the literary homeplace In Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Grace Dillon suggests that science fiction can be a natural storytelling form for Indigenous people. Dillon explains that “Indigenous science fiction is not so new”; structured around close observations of nature, Indigenous science’s established philosophical traditions work to “reenergize the natural environment” and disseminate knowledge “under the tutelage of an Indigenous mentor” (2–8). Dillon, who provides multiple classifications of Indigenous science fiction, has previously labeled Hopkinson’s awardwinning novel Midnight Robbers a form of Indigenous science and sustainability. I would argue that we also see Indigenous science in several of the short stories from Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids.

Horror 113 Based in Canada, Hopkinson’s “Delicious Monster,” a story from Falling in Love with Hominids, draws from the multiple Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro-Caribbean traditions that inform the nation. In “Delicious Monster,” Hopkinson begins with commentary on the natural versus the “built” environment; the opening sentence “[t]he tree was still there,” when juxtaposed with the hardy and “unseasonable thistles and rogue lawn grass,” suggests nature’s inability to be controlled or understood, a theme carried out throughout the story (162–180). Invoking nature as complex, timeless, and uncontrollable, isn’t Hopkinson’s only inclusion of Indigenous science; a series of parallelling, and sometimes, intersecting descriptions of plants, people, and animals serve as reminders of nature’s overlaps, the connections between different species. In these sections, Hopkinson’s use of asyndeton creates a breathless, well-integrated space that allows for an understanding of the self as fragmented, and whole only through recognizing the natural environment as forming part of one’s spiritual community. This space could also be viewed through the lens of what Kinitra D. Brooks terms a “literary homeplace,” which incorporates bell hooks’ concept of black women’s private, physical spaces, into “a constructed intellectual space,” specifically, one “created and maintained by black women genre writers” (72). The literary homeplace, like hooks’ homeplace, allows for constructing new “structures of meaning” and fashioning a “self-definition” (or self-definitions) released from conventional notions about race, gender, or sexuality (389). I would argue that generating new “structures of meaning” and creating a free, holistic self may involve a restructuring or rethinking of linear time. Hopkinson flattens memories or manipulates time with stories that begin in medias res and emphasize the fragmented or unresolved self. This intentional reworking of time suggests the importance of integrating memories, dreams, and histories from multiple sources, including nature, to form a unified self. Throughout “Delicious Monster,” a story Hopkinson tells us was named after she discovered the “Latin name of the split-leaved philodendron … translates into ‘delicious monster,’” we experience nature as a spiritual presence (162). Filled with images of birds, snakes, trees, and suns (the story takes place during a solar eclipse), the story alludes to the Hindu gods Vishnu and Garuda and the Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli. The more Jerry learns about his father, Carlos, and his relationship with the handsome Sudharshan—Jerry later discovers he is the god Vishnu—the more entrenched an understanding of nature and spirituality becomes to understanding the self (176). Hopkinson reveals how humans’ relationships with nature, in some ways, replicates their relationships with each other. As Jerry walks to Carlos’s condominium, he not only sees a tree with a “swollen middle” that both suggests pregnancy and a sexually aroused phallus (“flowed in rolls like lava,” “its wood welling and swelling,” “tree’s bulge”), he also experiences vivid memories of a childhood trip to the zoo. At the zoo, a puma with a “fixed, hungry stare” had “charged him” after Jerry taunts him

114 Horror (163–165). The tree, cloaked in the language of fertility, and the puma who “slammed against the Lucite,” reinforce nature as a living, visceral truth. If a tree contains “living wood” and if the glass that separates person from animal in a zoo responds with a “heavy thump” able to knock a child “backward onto his behind,” then the distance separating human from animal may not be so large (163). The puma, whose “dull disinterested stare” initially replicates Jerry’s father’s coolness (“his dad had barely said a word to him all weekend”), and the “freaky-looking” tree are varieties of the “delicious monster,” the plants, animals, and humans that populate the story. As Jerry stares at the tree, a man whose leaf-colored hair—the man’s hair is “dyed green”—and “gnarled beauty” recall a “bonsai tree” (164). We later learn that this man, named Gar, is the son of Garuda, the bird-human-god (178–179). The tree is a “delicious monster,” like most of the men in the story, who are queer and of color, and revealed to be either deities or deeply connected to them (164). From an apartment “painted” by both man (Carlos) and God (Vishnu/ Sudharshan) “with images of the sun” to Carlos’s “manly bulge” which links him with the “bulge” of the “swollen tree” that eventually “burst at the belly” and gives birth to Garuda, humanity, nature, spirituality, and the formation of the self are deeply connected (165–168, 175). Significantly, Carlos and Jerry are able to have a healthy father–son relationship as Jerry recaptures his lost memories about spirituality and nature and develops a stronger self (167). These memories are revealed in present time (167). For instance, when Jerry reminds Carlos that he “used to hunt snakes … as a boy,” Hopkinson invites us to consider how a memory,5 immersed in nature and spirituality, allows for a whole, healthy self in the present. And through his gold-lined goggles, Jerry’s father looked at him, really saw him clearly. “My god,” Dad whispered. “I did.” He reached for Jerry and pulled him into an embrace, laughing, crying. Surprised, Jerry hugged back. His dad’s shoulders were broader than they looked. (177) The snakes suggest an alteration—leap—in time and emotion. Carlos’s memory happens within the present-tense action of the story but the memory physically changes his sense of self. It makes his shoulders “broader”; it enables him to react more tenderly with his son; he uses the pronoun “I” in an active sentence, where he sounds more capable than he does in other places in the story. Hopkinson’s use of what Dillon calls an “Indigenous scientific literacies” that “reenergize the natural environment while improving the interconnected relationships among all persons (animal, human, spirit, and even machine)” seems to be apparent here (13). It is a story in which we learn to see Carlos as an observer and steward of his environment—and understand that by learning to view himself this way, he grows stronger.

Horror 115 The concept of a “literary homeplace” also informs Hopkinson’ work. Defined by Brooks as both a place of “self-revelation” and “resistance,” the literary homeplace, from my understanding, suggests that once black women writers (and perhaps other oppressed groups) work in speculative fictions freed from the traditional constraints of race, gender, and class, the writing grows more resistant, more antagonistic towards “multiple hegemonies” (72–73). And if speculative fiction frees a writer to “express her black woman weird,” and challenge multiple oppressions, then perhaps speculative fiction offers opportunities to rethink or re-imagine some of our most entrenched cultural ideas, including those of time. If humanity and our existence is defined by time, then the way we think and construct temporality has radical repercussions for liberation. The literary homeplace allows for an exploration of time and time travel as we see in Hopkinson’s ironic “Message in a Bottle.” “Message in a Bottle” features Kamla, a PhD-wielding time traveler who appears as a child, telling an artist, Greg, that his most memorable work is so because of an incidentally placed shell in his installation. Hopkinson’s “Message in a Bottle” warns against human hubris and speciesism—the genius selected to be in “a giant retrospective” from the future, covering “tens of thousands of works of art from all over the world, and all over the world’s history,” is the mollusk, not Greg. In “Message in a Bottle,” Hopkinson pokes fun at the GreatChain-of-Being, in a wild, time-traveling narrative that reimagines the (male) artist-genius. Speculative fiction such as “Message in a Bottle,” can allow for more play, for radical re-thinkings of entrenched cultural ideas. But strange or speculative fictions can also ask us to consider forgotten moments and histories, by creating the sensation of time travel through allusions to myths and histories that slow and expand the narrative. This becomes clear in Hopkinson’s short story, “Herbal.” “Herbal’s” brevity almost marks it as flash fiction but in this short piece, Hopkinson allows two different realities, from different moments in time, to intersect. Writing any form of “non-realistic” fiction requires grounding the reader in a new, unfamiliar reality; in a short story, there may be less time for world-building, or for the glimmering diversions we find in some novels. How, in the space of 20 to 30 pages, can a writer investigate the uncanny and a new, unfamiliar way of looking at the world, while also revealing parallels with this one? Hopkinson argues for fiction that “never gives the reader time to disbelieve” (121); Hopkinson immediately positions the reader within the trauma and suggests, by not providing an explanation for its existence, trauma as pervasive, perhaps conquerable or understood only through communal ties or memory. While not AfroSurreal stories— AfroSurreal texts may be created by artists of any race, but the protagonist is always of African descent—“Message in a Bottle” and “Herbal” seems closely connected to it. Hopkinson’s use of Indigenous science and references to Native culture and history (the protagonist of “Message in a Bottle” is “Rosebud Sioux on my mum’s side”) may mark these texts as

116 Horror what Dillon terms Indigenous science and sustainability (39). Recognizing the specific traditions underlying speculative fictions is important. While not wishing to elide differences, I want to point out that many Native American cultures and African cultures are influenced by oral storytelling, which may feel more present-centered, as the oral storyteller’s voice and gestures continuously remind the audience of time and place. In other words, written stories influenced by oral storytelling cultures may also create a sensation of present-centered time, as “[t]ime becomes now and place here” through interaction and audience participation (Schöler 66). Further, in his studies of African novels, Ato Quayson has noted our emotions, and perhaps, our spiritual philosophies, may extend or alter our experiences of time and our understanding of the world as “inherently evolving … liminal and changeable” (181–184). Hopkinson plays with time, by intertwining past and present events, and surreal and horrific moments, to force their readers to recognize how cultures’ specific chronopolitics reveal the way individuals conceive of the self. Finally, arguing that these stories reimagine time or that an Indigenous science or literary homeplace informs a work doesn’t mean these works are uninterested in truth or logic. What I argue, instead, is that these stories exist outside the realm of bivalent logic; they explore ideas that are neither true nor false. In other words, these stories reject binaries and deepen our understanding that “[t] he negation of true doesn’t have to be false. It could be something else, such as being undetermined” (Vaidya 10). In this discussion of AfroSurrealism, Indigenous science, and the literary homeplace and how they offer specific ways of thinking about time, I wish to avoid suggesting that these creative modes are more “true” than western philosophies; instead, I want to raise the possibility that these movements offer their own unique philosophies about time, memory, and selfhood. Hopkinson’ humorous, four-page-story “Herbal” explores what happens when the proverbial elephant enters the room. In “Herbal,” the elephant is a dilemma facing many college students: what to do after college? Will one be able to find employment? “Herbal’s” central concern appears to be class oppression, and from the beginning of the story, we’re faced with the “powerful kick” of income inequality (121). Jenny, the college student who is the story’s protagonist, doesn’t have time to react as an elephant appears before her, leaving her staring at the elephant’s “massive feet,” how its “head brushed the ceiling” (121). Hopkinson offers no explanation for why the elephant appears on Jenny’s “the fifteenth floor” apartment but Jenny’s “fright and disbelief ” suggest the elephant represents a kind of anxiety, one I view as linked to financial concerns. In a short space, Hopkinson establishes that Jenny is worried about a class she is “glumly, doggedly failing,” that she must “[sell] the textbooks” out of financial need, that she feels “lighter” only after she sells them and has “crisp bills of money” in her hand (23). The elephant appears to represent Jenny’s fears of what will happen post-graduation, an

Horror 117 event Hopkinson finally discloses at the story’s close. Before this happens, we see Jenny as fractured, uncertain; her hand “so small” when compared with the elephant reaches out to touch the elephant and “[sets] off an avalanche of juddering flesh” (122). The elephant’s shakiness represents Jenny’s own anxieties (people often shake or quiver when anxious), and the elephant also suggests a selfdefined and splintered under capitalism. In a discussion about freedom and the myth of obedient, eager-to-beoppressed individuals, H.LT. Quan suggests that communal memories— the mental processes associated with “rebelliously time-traveling into a fugitive past,” embracing anarchy rather than top-down order, and understanding shared histories of resistance—create free, communal spaces (181–192). If we apply Quan’s theory to Jenny, then we understand how the lack of communal memories can destroy. The elephant entering Jenny’s private space, the space of her apartment, suggests Jenny’s individual self has been destroyed, shattered, just like the objects destroyed by the elephant. In other words, Jenny’s sense of self is defined by a job and by order; when the elephant defecates in her apartment, it destroys her sense of order and she is “outraged” enough to “[slap]” a massive animal “on its large, round rump” (122). If the elephant represents Jenny’s anxieties and a flight from conventional reality, then we can understand the story’s logic in multiple ways. The elephant could be “real” in the world of the story, but perhaps we shouldn’t take the elephant literally; as just Jenny and the elephant are in the apartment, no one can verify the “truth.” The elephant possibly represents an emotional truth: Jenny sees the “reality” of her life in a fantastic form directly in front of her and experiences a psychic break that is, simultaneously, a break from capitalism. We can note the range of objects the elephant disturbs—but does not destroy—as it wades through Jenny’s apartment. The elephant smashes the television first, “tangles of coloured wires and nubbins of shiny metal,” and it “knocks” (“its haunches knocked three rows of books”), but does not demolish, the books (121). The elephant shatters a vase, a “grudging gift from an aunt who never liked her”—a quick commentary on the range of emotions associated with material goods—and knocks over but does not “break” a pot holding “a large big-leaf thyme bush, fat and green from drinking in the sun” (121–123). The broken television suggests a fragility about media (the “destroyed television with its thousand channels of candied nothing”), and is juxtaposed with the nourishing aspects of plants (far from being “candied nothing,” the elephant eats and appears nourished by the thyme), and the sustainability of books. Perhaps Jenny is a young woman of color but that isn’t entirely clear. Jenny notices the elephant’s skin and wishes to treat the elephant to human luxuries, to apply lotion to its “gray-brown” skin; perhaps its color recalls her own skin (122). If Jenny is a woman of color that could enhance her anxiety about her future career choices: Fraser and Boot argue that the black professionals working in “the white world (government, education, public

118 Horror institutions, and the white-collar sector of industry” … have “no mass influence” (32). Still, Hopkinson does not clarify Jenny’s race, though Jenny’s interest and relationship with nature, suggests a worldview influenced by Indigenous science. Ultimately, Jenny finds a job as a “question-and-answer page for the local natural history museum,” and apparently conquers her anxiety (124). Her fears are resolved, not only by having a job and money, but also by the kind of job she has. In this four-page story, Hopkinson intersects the past and the present; Jenny will answer people’s questions about the ancient “habits of elephants” before “putting them up on the web page” (124). Jenny has a job that causes her to use contemporary technology as she researches nature’s enduring cycles, and this unwrapping of history and memory—she must investigate the elephants and other inhabitants of the natural world—with the present slows her anxiety. In the story’s final sentences, she gently holds another thyme plant, similar to the one the elephant chewed. At the end of the story, Jenny is hopeful (she is “hopefully scanning the darkening sky”) and able to face her fears as she waits for the elephant’s return (124). She has reconciled historical memory with her contemporary life and developed a calmer, holistic self in the process. Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ shifting selves and memories Griffiths, a poet and photographer whose oeuvre encompasses both AfroSurrealism and Black Magic Realism, melds the two in her photograph, Woman after Her Last Wound. The photograph highlights a seated woman, partially obscured by a weblike veil—a possible reminder of the Anansi spider legend—and the powerful residue of unresolved cultural and collective memories. Griffith’s veiled woman recalls what Brent Hayes Edwards describes as a black literary tradition of the veil as metaphor for “the excesses of slavery that are in some sense ‘unspeakable’” (40). We don’t know the obstacles the woman in Griffith’s photograph may have undergone but it could have been “unspeakable” trauma; we do know, from what we can see of her face, that the woman is unsmiling. Woman after Her Last Wound pronounces sight as deceptive, even as the woman’s veiled stare marks her as a sort of trickster. Seated in the middle of the photograph, surrounded by a cloud of blackness, the woman invites us to stare, to look. Still, we are prevented from looking: the woman’s face, partially obscured by a veil, is hidden. To gaze at the photograph is to gaze at the woman, but she refuses to become the object of the stare. The woman offers a version of herself, but that self is unknowable, the veil’s lattice-like structure suggests openness while remaining almost entirely opaque; the veil reminds us of all we don’t have access to, including the woman’s memories (Figure 5.1). Woman after Her Last Wound could be characterized as AfroSurreal because the image hesitates between a known world and one filled with mysteries. The concept of woman is, perhaps, familiar: but what leads her

Horror 119

Figure 5.1 Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Woman after Her Last Wound Source: Rachel Eliza Griffiths/Woman after Her Last Wound (2013) appears courtesy Rachel Eliza Griffiths, all rights reserved.

to sit, what surrounds her? Roger Rothman argues for photography as part of the Surrealist movement as “[c]amera produces images in which reality is disaggregated” and … offer us documents of an “unknown reality” (60). Griffiths’ photograph, absent of landmarks or objects, places us in a world we don’t know and heightens the intersections of the dreamlike unconscious and the real by seeming to belong, simultaneously, to several moments in time. While we know photography as a relatively recent artform, Woman after Her Last Wound’s lack of period-specific clothing or details means the image could exist in the “past,” “present,” or “future.” The photograph’s compression also generates a thrilling and unsteady sense of time, as our brains assimilate competing textures (the

120 Horror gauzy veil, the smooth background, the woman’s slender, muscular arms) in an attempt to situate the woman within a specific locale. In a featurelength film, Griffiths would have more space, frames for reporting the woman’s story, but a photograph’s compression forces us, with each glance, to attempt to release pre-assembled histories and memories. But by offering a woman set against a black background, with no identifiable markers, Griffiths positions us within a fluid stream of time. And while we do not understand or have access to the memories and events situated within this temporality, the woman’s hands reveal she does—she gingerly touches her veil as if to hold her memories in place. Griffiths, who in poems, such as “Elegy,” argues that “movies use tricks to invent memories we can recognize” demonstrates how an individual image can become incorporated into a larger, cultural memory. Images of reclining or seated women have been a feature of portraits and photographs, but few feature the woman looking back, with a gaze so surreptitious, which gnaws our thoughts. The photograph’s uncanniness—it may slowly dawn on the viewer that the woman underneath the veil is staring back—generates a new memory that reminds us that our gazes, our stares, are never fully protected. Subjects can very easily become objects. H.L.T. Quan has argued that “[t]he state’s memory must not be our only memory,” and by returning the gaze, by coolly looking back, Woman after Her Last Wound revises hegemonic memories (woman as subservient) while serving as catalyst for new ones (woman as sorcerer) (181). Is the woman in the photograph wounded? The photograph’s title suggests she has experienced trauma, even as her carriage, her unbent back and unbowed head, rescues us from self-absorbed pity, and instead, demands we recognize she has a self (or multiple selves) she won’t surrender to our observation. In this way, the AfroSurreal narrative differs from narratives in which blackness is destroyed by troubling or traumatic events. Feminist scholar bell hooks has written about a “[f]ascination with the topic of black self-hatred … so intense that it silenced any constructive discussion about loving blackness” (hooks 10). This self-hatred is absent from the photograph. Love and self-protection, a willingness to understand and manipulate time, and the desire to hold one’s memories as close as a favorite veil, suggest that in Woman after Her Last Wound, blackness is a generative source, one that protects and restores an individual and builds new, liberatory memories? Blackness as generative? Now run tell dat. Notes 1 Psychoanlayst Robert Stolorow argues that “experiences of trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present … past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition” (160).

Horror 121 2 In 2014, the American Psychological Association found that “black boys as young as 10 may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers, but are instead more likely to be mistaken as older”: www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/ black-boys-older. 3 A 1998 article in The Los Angeles Times reports that Schmitz’s father was a state senator, while one of her brothers was “much-admired White House counsel.” 4 The website Snopes.com disputes whether black babies were actually used as alligator bait but displays images from postcards and sheet music from a popular song (Henry Wise and Sidney Perrin’s “Mammy’s Little Alligator Bait”) depicting black children being stalked or hunted by alligators. 5 Spirituality is suggested through the snakes, which have spiritual meaning: several artworks from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries depict Vishnu sleeping on the serpent Ananta. To view these images, visit Francis W. Pritchett’s page on Vishnu and sculpture: www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/0400_0499/pantheon/ vishnushesha/vishnushesha.html.

Works cited Brooks, Kinitra. Searching for Sycorax. Rutgers UP, 2018. Dillon, Grace L. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012. Due, Tananarive. Ghost Summers. Prime Books, 2015. Francis, Terri. “Looking Sharp: Performance, Genre, and Questioning History in Django Unchained.” Transition. Vol. 112, 2013, pp. 32–45. www.muse.jhu.edu/article/523344. Fraser, Richard and Tom Boot. Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation. Red Letter Press, 2004. hooks, bell. “Homeplace (A Site of Resistance).” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. South End Press, 1990, pp. 382–390. Libcom.org. https://libcom.org/library/homeplace-siteresistance. Hopkinson, Nalo. Falling in Love with Hominids. Tachyon, 2015. Hull, Aksasha and T. Gloria. Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African-American Women. Inner Traditions, 2001. Quayson, Ato. “Magical Realism and the African Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, edited by F. Abiola Irele, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Saldias, Gabriel. “Remembering a Socialist Future in Postdictatorship Chile: Utopian Anticipation and Anti-Utopian Critique in Jorge Baradit’s Synco.” Utopian Studies: The Journal for the Society of Utopian Studies. Vol. 29, No. 3, 2018, pp. 398–415. Schöler, Bo. “Mythic Realism in Native American Literature.” American Studies in Scandinavia. Vol. 17, 1985, pp. 65–73. Vaidya, Anand J. “Meditation on Relativism, Abolutism, and Beyond.” Comparative Philosophy. Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014, pp. 1–19. https://anandvaidya.weebly.com/papers.html.

Conclusion Jeffrey Renard Allen and sustaining the surreal moment

In a recent email exchange, acclaimed novelist and scholar Jeffrey Renard Allen professed his concerns with the inconsistencies inherent in the word “AfroSurrealism.” Allen, who has been writing and studying fantastic texts for several decades, argues the term “AfroSurrealism” bears the weight of Surrealism and, subsequently, cannot be so easily separated from Surrealism’s original meaning. Allen maintains Amiri Baraka’s term “AfroSurreal Expressionism” presents a distinction: Surrealism, “creates an irrational world based in a dream or dream logic,” while Expressionism “presents a world that is distorted through a character’s perspective.” Finally, Allen cites Anaïs Nin’s The Novel of the Future and Nin’s belief that “there is no purely Surrealist writer,” that Surrealism has an unsustainable quality that makes it particularly hard to achieve in long-form fiction, such as the novel. Are there any novels, Allen asks, that are truly surreal? Allen does not view himself as an AfroSurreal writer, and his essay, “Urgently Visible: Why Black Lives Matter,” suggests a whiteness so dependent on blackness for its definition and existence that black suffering will unavoidably be perpetuated. Allen questions whether creative writing can affect change or end suffering, that to “raise the consciousness of people who might join the struggle” is “activism, not writing.” Allen’s position runs counter to my position that surreal or speculative writing slowly transforms society. “Urgently Visible” filters compassion through an examination of the realities of black lives—from inadequate health care to microaggressions in our institutions of learning to police shootings—and reveals that conquering these problems requires an empathy and understanding that is hard to generate, more difficult to sustain. Fiction, Allen posits, cannot compel us to act. Literature cannot create legislation, and perhaps, by temporarily assuaging liberal guilt, it leads to complacency. My argument focuses on black psychology, and I realize the premise of a speculative genre that maintains black resiliency may seem hard to swallow. I argue for art that creates the psychological strength and focus for fighting for—and engaging in—political and social change. My argument is less about protest fiction allowing white readers to more fully understand black humanity (which is how some audiences have traditionally viewed socially engaged art) or art enacting change in a linear, instructive-driven

Conclusion 123 manner. So how can a surreal fiction, fiction that produces uncertainty about reality, help us understand survival? These surreal moments, lodged within a creative text, form a narrative that threatens to break from the tension of holding contradictory ideas about reality, validate black subjectivity, the experience of living under oppression—and offer opportunities for dreaming of new ways to create change. Toni Morrison has written about the importance of developing “a theory of literature that truly accommodates Afro-American literature: one that is based on its culture, its history, and the artistic strategies the works employ to negotiate the world it inhabits” (135). This book, which focuses primarily on novel-length texts, does not attempt something that grand, when several scholars have been investigating black music, poetry, theater, and short fiction. Lorenzo Thomas argues that “we do need to nurture the idea, or concept of an African American avant-garde.” I offer a hypothesis about one particular mode of black speculative fiction—the AfroSurreal— and suggest reasons to categorize and carefully examine subsets of the black fantastic. Allen’s thought-provoking questions pose interesting problems, especially if one views AfroSurrealism as a subset of Surrealism. I argue that perhaps these problems can be resolved, first, if one is willing to recognize AfroSurrealism as its own movement, one offering a distinctive method for interacting and relating to the world. Admirably, André Breton rejected the idea that European civilizations are superior to those from other cultures, but embedded in his writings are the limitations of language. In the 1924 Manifesto, Breton wrote about logic’s hierarchical position in western society, and chastizes “the ordinary observer” who finds more value in “waking events than … those occurring in dreams.” But who is this ordinary observer? In order to see something as a dream, one must first define “dream”; in order to reject rationality, one must first develop a definition and concept of rationality and logic. People from different cultural backgrounds may disagree on what constitutes rationality, and culture influences how we understand and interact with the world: perhaps some of us already view as surreal a world where police officers (those designated to protect) may murder and where race (an ambiguously defined phenomenon) results in life-altering consequences, such as police brutality and housing and job discrimination. AfroSurrealism dramatizes these problems, by showing how black protagonists may confront the surreal. At the same time, AfroSurrealism makes the causes for the surreal experience unclear; in the narrative, a strange or nightmarish experience could be explained as the result of trauma, the supernatural, or an unjust society. AfroSurrealism differs from Surrealism in other ways. Just as Afrofuturism embodies the Italian Futurists’ interest in technology, but remains an anti-fascist and less masculine-centered movement than Futurism, AfroSurrealism adopts some of the ideas of Surrealism while questioning others. For instance, AfroSurrealism retains Surrealism’s interest in the mind and in non-rational systems of knowledge. And, as with all forms of Surrealism,

124 Conclusion AfroSurrealism is anti-capitalist, and also, strongly anti-authoritarian. The AfroSurreal text is concerned, above all, with liberty. The critic György Lukács argues avant-garde movements produced no liberatory novels, that if literature shows everyone as alienated from an absurd world, then it does not produce understanding, or an emancipatory effect. I disagree. Surreal fictions can draw attention to mental anguish as well as those rooted in “realism.” Perhaps, in some cases, surreal texts can produce a deeper emotional response. While Nin may have questioned if an entire novel could be surreal, Nin did locate in the strange, surreal moments of less realistic fiction “all the potentialities of life.” The surreal moments scattered throughout the AfroSurreal novel allow for a deeper understanding of the emotional complexity of the black protagonist’s life. Blackness itself poses the biggest challenge for my argument for an AfroSurreal space. Clyde R. Taylor describes how the “transcendent whiteness always remains haunted by the dreaded return of the repressed … the surfacing of … black humanity” (35). It is possible to view blackness as disrupting a linear timeline; there are some black cultures that do not accept time as a progressive, straight line. Because time may bend and exist as parallel, alternate paths, it becomes harder to make an argument for AfroSurrealism, which I view as a present-centered literature investigating how dreams of the future, memories of the past, and possible hallucinations or mental disturbances may intersect. In other words, if history and the future lack clear definitions, it becomes challenging to make an argument that AfroSurreal texts incorporate alternative, lesser known histories as a means of understanding and surviving a strange, alienating, and confusing present. However, we have not yet reached the transhuman stage, the phase where humans move beyond “physical achievements” (Spriggs 64). As humans who have been positioned as primitive and in opposition to modernity, even as our black bodies and intellects helped to shape it, we have had to develop strategies for surviving oppression and celebrating our lives. I argue that one of these strategies is culture, specifically the AfroSurreal text, where we hesitate between the dream and reality, and find freedom in the uncertainty.

Appendix

I was fortunate to be able to sit down with the two extraordinary AfroSurreal creators, Tananarive Due and Damon Davis and discuss their groundbreaking work. Two recent interviews with them reveal how AfroSurreal/Afrofuturist thought consciously invokes the past to reveal truths about the present. A version of “Don’t Forget Traditions While You March Into the Future: An Interview with Tananarive Due” first appeared in the literary journal TriQuarterly in 2019. I wish to thank Tananarive Due and Damon Davis for the discussion and editors Carrie Muehle, Serena Simpson, and James McAnally for making these interviews possible. “Don’t Forget Traditions while You March into the Future”: An Interview with Tananarive Due If we’re experiencing a renaissance in AfroSurreal/Afrofuturist horror, then one of the artists responsible for this renaissance is Tananarive Due. While some readers may know Due from her ability to create astonishingly vivid and atmospheric scenes in fiction, such as My Soul to Keep (1997), Joplin’s Ghost (2005), and Ghost Summer (2015), the American Book Award, the British Fantasy Award, and an NAACP Image Award recipient is also a filmmaker and an executive producer of the Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, the celebrated 2019 documentary examining the role of Blacks in horror. Due is co-creator, with husband and acclaimed science fiction writer Steven Barnes, of one of the first lecture series on Afrofuturism, and teaches a class on Afrofuturism and horror, which included a visit from award-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele. In between writing a screenplay and a novel, one of horror’s most respected and beloved writers discussed process and how navigating the future means developing an understanding of the past. You’re young but still a pioneer. You attended the very first conference on Afrofuturism, held at Clark Atlanta University. It was 1997. I met Octavia Butler, the speculative fiction writer Steven Barnes who became my husband, and Samuel R. Delany. I interviewed

126 Appendix Octavia and heard Delany speak about his work. I learned I was not alone— and I was newly published in 1995 … I was happy to be in the room. I’d become a writer as an undergraduate at Northwestern. Janet Desaulniers and Sheila Schwartz were both so encouraging of me while I was there. But I was writing white characters. I was a journalism major but I fulfilled all requirements of English major and I was swimming in the canon—I had to read deep English classics. What story would feel like to me then was a story about white man or woman. It was just that an epiphany story about a white housewife felt like a perfectly natural thing for me to write. So, at the conference, it was gratifying to find so many other writers whose stories came to them in a highly unusual way. Fantasy, science fiction, horror gave us our clearest voice. We had been lonely until that point … My first story was about a talking cat. But I avoided fantasy and by the time I started imaging “What does a writer look like?” I had given up. Between the rediscovery of being a Black writer, a Black speculative fiction writer, I wrote a letter to my sister, “Do you think there will be an audience for this?” I knew there was Terry McMillan and a burgeoning interest in black fiction—I was lucky that included speculative fiction I liked. We got caught up in the moment and were able to find an audience there. Our belief initiates or guides our actions or it does nothing. Octavia provides a blueprint for how to create change. And Samuel Delany was a pioneer. But when he emerged in the 1960s as the only Black science fiction writer that wasn’t even what he was trying to express … We saw things that troubled us and wrote about it. Call it Afrofuturism but then few of us self-identified. You teach popular classes on Afrofuturism and Black horror. The great filmmaker Jordan Peele visited one of your courses, “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and Black Horror Aesthetic.” I started teaching Afrofuturism at UCLA four years ago. I was invited to teach it. It was the first time I had taught it as such. We’ve been building our syllabus. But we forget how often these works are futuristic and also about history. As humans, no matter where we go, there we are. With historical fiction you have to understand and rely on human psychology. Customs change but humans are quite predictable. You’re an Afrofuturist but engage with history? History is always a character in my stories. In the African Immortal series (My Soul to Keep, The Living Blood, Blood Colony, and My Soul to Take), the literal form of the Ethiopian immortal is a witness to history … History moved in. Even when my books aren’t as much about history, it’s always in the margins. These aren’t just character sketches. Grandmothers have stories they don’t tell. Our great-grandmothers too … My mother the late Patricia Stephens Due and father John Due were both activists. My father is a civil rights attorney. My mother died in 2012, and she really was that storyteller who made sure I understood history. These

Appendix 127 stories need to come out of her. We see things accomplished only a short time ago, forgotten. This is why, much to my own surprise, I spend so much time researching history. My 11th grade history teacher, Mrs. Hayworth, taught from college textbook and that was my best engagement with history as a student. Previously I wasn’t as interested in history, so it’s ironic how much time I spend researching history, pushing myself, discovering what’s really the story. In Ghost Summer and the novel I’m currently working on, the Dozier School is alluded to, and I’m wondering how does this history have an impact on the present? Afrofuturism engages with conversations about the past, present, and future. (That’s something a movie like Black Panther represents so well, through the technically advanced Wakanda, vibranium, and conversations about colonialism, history.) That’s a common aspect of Afrofuturism—don’t forget traditions while you march into the future. This is an exciting moment for Afrofuturism and horror, with many Black filmmakers—Peele, Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Rungano Nyoni, Boots Riley making inroads. And you’re executive producer of Horror Noire, the acclaimed horror documentary. I executive-produced Horror Noire with Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman and Ashlee Blackwell. I was invited because of my Black Horror class. Brought in as a scholar and personality, a known face in Black horror … Glad to be there. Move forward classes on Black Horror. When she [Means Coleman] was working on that book, Black horror wasn’t considered worthy of what she was trying to accomplish—thoughtful and critical attention. She added some footage and spent a lot of time researching with Ashlee Blackwell. Very excited about this documentary, which is available on Shudder. We are definitely in a moment but in terms of Black people, specifically all black actors, writers, and directors working. Ava DuVernay and Peele and all the filmmakers have created a wave of creativity, a rising tide lifting all boats, similar to what happened to the Black literature movement in the 1990s. It’s a great time to be out there and engaging our imaginations. While our documentary ends on an optimistic note, I also want to caution against being overly optimistic—it’s still difficult to get a film made, there’s so much machinery involved. You still find funding or make a crowd-funding campaign, you’ve got to make doors open. Everyone has a different story about how they got into it, the industry. It’s an industry built on relationships. Here are lots of opportunities to build relationships and nothing is going to come to anyone. I’ve sold pilots, sold scripts, but I still consider the industry a rubix cube, something I enjoy figuring out. Your journalism background must be helpful. You have an eye for detail and an expansive career that includes journalism, film, screenwriting, novels. How does writing in different forms influence your work?

128 Appendix I didn’t set out to write all these different kinds of writing. I proclaimed myself a writer at four. Journalism was a detour. My parents encouraged me to put food on her table. Journalism was once a pretty stable field— that’s how I came to journalism. I saw it as a day job … The actual dream was to have a steady income and write what I want to write, from the first time I started publishing. And My Soul to Keep [Due’s second novel] was optioned. Based on watching those options not go anywhere, I wanted to be more involved in the process. I thought that would be by learning to write screenplays from producers and self-study. I consider myself a student of screenwriting even though I now teach it. Nonfiction is like math, determining the right portion of a person’s quotation, piercing and understanding it. I like the feeling of being overcome by work. That’s how my essays come about … Writing prose is still my happy place but there’s something about breaking the code of how to write a screenplay. Screenwriting relies so much on outlining. So there’s math to screenwriting and writing a treatment. I’m in love with it. I love working on a screenplay and finding joy at new engagement. I also love the classroom. I love movies. Storytelling is storytelling, no matter the form. What’s the role of research in your work? I go as deep as possible. I encourage writers to visit settings because research and being there can make a huge difference … I research everything, every bird, every tree. I advised a PhD student I was mentoring, who had a story set after devastating event and wanted to bring attention to Haiti, that even if you can’t get there, confine it to a small space. But tell your stories. Still, the research varies by project. I’ve never been to Ethiopia [in reference to the African Immortals series] but I relied upon historical texts and researched as much as I could. The novel was in progress, set in Florida, and I purposely chose to write about my mother’s coming of age, era 1950s. But a lot of writers fall into the research as a procrastination trap. Could you tell me more about your new project? You mentioned it earlier and some ideas seem suggested in your short fiction (e.g., “Ghost Summer,” “The Reformatory”) and other work. I don’t let myself talk too much about work. Could let the air out of tires. But I’ve been working on this novel for five years. I was once trying to write a book a year. Talking about a work will use up all your energy for it. But I’m eager to go back and finish this novel, which is based in reallife family history, my mother’s great uncle Robert Stephens who died in the Dozier School—Colson Whitehead also writes about the Dozier School in Nickel Boy—in 1937. The school is haunted. It began as a short story was published in The Boston Review as The Reformatory. It’s the story of a brother and sister left alone when the father is falsely accused of rape. The brother and sister are left alone, and the brother is locked up … With this writing, I’m trying to get him free. I’m trying to rewrite history.

Appendix 129 Exploring Contemporary Life for People Like Me: Damon Davis on the Darker Gods Exhibition What hasn’t Damon Davis created? Davis is founder of Farfetched, the independent music and art imprint based in St. Louis, MO; a rapper who creates songs with people’s souls hovering in the lyrics; co-director, with Sabaah Folayn, of Whose Streets, a documentary about the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown and the aftermath in Ferguson; a visual artist whose photographic series All Hands On Deck reminded people of the significance of Brown’s tragic final gesture. But as prolific as Davis is, this isn’t art for art’s sake. Davis’s work surges with a central message: the urgency of recording and documenting the complexity of Black life. In our brief phone conversation, I realized that Davis’s work helps people—those ignored or silenced—to understand that their lives do matter. Davis describes his most recent exhibition, Darker Gods in the Garden of the Low-Hanging Heavens (Figure A.1), as an “AfroSurreal allegory.” A lot of your art examines #BlackLivesMatter and remembering people who have been murdered. Davis: What Ferguson did—I experienced. The people I met are part of a bigger wider movement. I played a role here, in advocating for change. It had to happen. I put all my energy into that. Whose Streets and All Hands on Deck are about protecting people you care about; you create soul food and armor for people who need it. In Scott Huegerich’s “Story to Tell,” a documentary tribute to your work, you describe how “you shouldn’t be pigeonholed or locked into something because of where you come from,” how does Darker Gods fit with this idea? Davis: I don’t try to quantify it or compute it too much. It comes from the most natural place, where I’m from and what is around me. For the last 3–4 years, most of my work has been specific to the world … I wanted to step out of talking about black pain. The show is about mythology and how people explained the world before science. There are different origin stories about gods, and black cultural norms and tropes—and negating these tropes, playing with different ideas. I’ve been creating these black gods, working on this for 2½ years to generate an origin story—and all different people have origin stories. There were different words at one point. I’m exploring contemporary life for people like me. And creating visual art and short films about that. Davis: Pain—it’s not the only thing there. I also come from a family where you laugh to keep from crying. You express joy and anger, to ward off all that. That’s where religion came in for all kinds of people. Myths keep generations of people alive. I’ve been meditating on this, creating a three part series about Loa from Louisiana Voodoo culture …

130 Appendix

Figure A.1 Photograph by Brea Youngblood of Damon Davis’s The Luminary 38.

My work isn’t so much Afrofuturism—it’s not so much the future as AfroSurrealism, the realm next door, where we’re already thinking about spirits and the absurdity of life in front of you. We’re exploring not events happening 50 years into the future but the amazing things happening in regular life. How did you develop the myths? Davis: So I’m making them up as I go. As far as inspiration, I’m looking at Yoruba culture and also Greek and Roman myths, the Bible—sources available to everyone in the west. I’m looking at specific parables, reflections of people’s everyday reactions. In Darker Gods, there is a boy who is god of music, a god of the ghetto children … I like to talk about people bourgie people don’t like to be around, the people who are not allowed many opportunities.

Appendix 131 So in Darker Gods, there’s also a god of war, and I’m thinking of the way the world is angry—and making up a story of how it becomes like that. There’s a story about a sister who is a super powerful witch—there are women who helped you and raised you—and they’re supposed to be so tough, so strong, but no one checks in on you. I looked at polytheistic religions and found they’re much more dynamic. They’ve got so many molds—there’s great god of water who heals until you piss him off, and I’m thinking of the “one true God,” and how in any other culture that predates Christianity, Judaism, there’s that idea of water, of nature. These ideas are in so many other cultures, the Native American culture—these are older, indigenous ideas. The origins stories I’ve included, they’ve given me a new background for creating work.

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures Abani, Chris 15, 49–62 Ades, Dawn 25 Adrián, Francisco Hernández 1 Africa, Jalada 67 “African-American,” phrase of 36 African American culture, communication with the dead and 111–112 African culture: communication with the dead and 111–112; oral storytelling and 116 African Diaspora 22, 33 African Immortal series 126 Afri-COBRA 26, 66 AfroCommunism (Ottaway and Ottaway) 76 Afrofuture(s) (Africa) 67 Afrofuturism 24, 54, 55; AfroSurrealism and 5; blackness and psychological pressures 78–79; Govan as leading scholar in 4; history of exhibitions and showcases 69; on idea of people of color 82; legacy of 69–70; movement of 3, 67; reliance on language 77–78; 2.0 4–5, 14; visual technologies and dystopia 77–83 Afrofuturism (Womack) 4–5 Afrofuturist: Dark Room Collective and 68; novels, contemporary 66; philosophies 28; see also Afrofuturism Afrofuturist cinematic storytelling 64–72 AfroSurreal: art 98; Dark Room Collective and 68; Ellis’s work and 68; fiction 25; grotesque 49–62; narratives 72, 120; novels, contemporary 66; perspective on race 89; texts 21–22, 24, 25–26; texts, humor in 88; see also AfroSurrealism AfroSurreal cinematic storytelling 64–72 AfroSurreal Expressionism 2, 65, 122

AfroSurrealism: Afrofuturism and 5; Animist Realism and 34–35, 36–37, 38; Black Aesthetic Movement (BAM) and 65–66, 70; and black culture 12, 90; blackness and psychological pressures 78–79; examination of race 40; Griffiths and 118–120; history of exhibitions and showcases 69; movement 54, 67, 95; as a new black surrealism 1–18; science and 57–58; social change and 10–18; steam fun and 110–111; slipstream and 86–99; as subset of black modernism 24–33; Surrealism, avant-garde and 21–24; vs Surrealism 123–124; as a term 42; see also magical realism AfroSurreal Manifesto (Miller) 5 AfroSurreal space, blackness in 124 Alan Clark’s Water Goddess 51 Ali, Muhammad 43 Allen, Jeffrey Renard 122–124 All Hands On Deck (Davis) 129 American cultures, oral storytelling and 116 Amityville Horror (film) 107 Anaïs Duplan’s Center for Afrofuturist Studies 68 Anansi, Brer 42 Anderson, Akili Ron 66 Anderson, Reynaldo 4, 16, 32, 54, 55, 65, 67, 102 Animist Realism 6, 9, 14, 34–35, 36–37, 38–39, 42, 52, 102 Arguedas, José 33 Artaud, Antonin 25 Ashby, Madeline 54 Astrofuturism 54 Asturias, Miguel Angel 33

Index 133 Atlantis: Model 1924 (Delany) 68 Avant-garde: AfroSurrealism and 21–24; Bürger on 26; movements 124 The Avant-Garde: Race Religion War (Sell) 25, 26 avatars 22 Ayewa, Camae 68 Badu, Erykah 67 Bakhtin, Mikhail 50 BAM see Black Aesthetic Movement (BAM) Baraka, Amiri 2, 3, 6, 65, 69–70, 75, 92, 122 Barber, Tiffany 66 Barnes, Steven 67, 125 Barth, John 29 Bataille, George 76 Bate, David 26 Bearden, Romare 26 Bellah-Guther, Hally 68 Beloved (Morrison) 38, 39 Bender, Aimee 87 Benjamin, Playthell 57 Big Machine (LaValle) 86–99 “binaristic blackness” 38 Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Rosemont and Kelley) 1, 2 Black Aesthetic Movement (BAM), AfroSurrealism and 10, 65–66, 70 black aesthetics 5, 21 black America 26 black art 26 black artists 21, 22, 26 Black Arts Movement 21, 25, 26, 65, 66, 68, 70 Black Ball 66–67 black Christianity 93 black culture: AfroSurrealism and 8, 90; Coleman on 107; “Diaspora” within 35; fluid legal identities 9 black experience 54 black intellectuals 22 #BlackLivesMatter movement 55, 129 Black Magic Realism 118 black modernism: Afrosurrealism as subset of 24–33 blackness 3, 4, 72, 90, 124 Black Panther (film) 4 Black Power Movement 10–11 black protagonist 23 Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice (Phillips) 4 Black Quantum Futurists, Philadelphia’s 68

Black Quantum Theory 28, 29 Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM) 4, 32, 54, 65, 68 black Surrealism 1, 2, 64 “Black to the Future” (Dery) 3 black visual art 66 Blackwell, Ashlee 127 black youth culture 3 Bloch, Ernst 110 Blood Colony (Due) 126 Borges, Jorges Luis 86 Bowers, Maggie Ann 14 boy snow bird (Oyeyemi) 22, 23, 24, 26; language of 27; rethinking primitivism and 32–44 Brenner, Summer 16–17, 86–99 Breton, André 1, 6, 123 Brewster (Sunil’s supervisor) 60, 61 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz) 16, 64–83 Brooks, Kinitra D. 17, 113, 115 Brooks, Lonny 54 Brown, Adrienne Maree 54 Brown, Michael 129 Bryant, Tisa 70 BSAM see Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM) Bürger, Peter 24–25, 26 Burns, Lorna 50, 51 Butler, Octavia 3, 10, 54, 55, 125 Cabral, Hypatía Belicia 73–76 Capuchine, La Bell (slave) 44 Carpentier, Alejandro 40, 43, 50 Cave, Nick 68 Center for Afrofuturist Studies 68 Césaire, Aimé 2, 4, 44 Césaire, Suzanne 2, 44 Céspedes, Diógenes 64 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 36 Chanady, Amaryll 33 Chayko, Mary 77–78 Chen, Jun Mian 37 Chiang, Ted 90 Christmas, Annie 36 cinematic storytelling, AfroSurreal, Afrofuturist, and 64–83 Claire of the Sea Light (Danticat) 15, 49–62 Cleaver, Eldridge 93 Clifford, James 75–76 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 112 Cobb, William Jelani 4, 22–23 Cole, Kevin 66

134 Index The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron) 27 Coogler, Ryan 4 Cortez, Jayne 2, 68 Cossery, Albert 6 Counternarratives (Keene) 67 Cowans, Adger 66 creolization 23 cultural knowledge, Big Machine and Oakland Tales, and 86, 95, 96, 98–99 “cultural mulatto,” Ellis’s 21 cultural pollination 23 Cunard, Nancy 6 Czech Surrealists 32 Damas, Léon Gontran 2 Damon Davis’s The Luminary 38 130 Danow, David K. 50 Danticat, Edwidge 15, 49–62 Darker Gods (Davis) 130–131 Darker Gods in the Garden of the Low-Hanging Heavens (exhibition) 129 The Dark Knight Returns (film) 73 Dark Room Collective 67, 68 Davie see Stephens, Kofi Davie Davis, Damon 125, 129, 130 Davis, Milton 110 Delany, Samuel R. 3, 4, 67, 68, 125, 126 “Delicious Monster” (Hopkinson) 113, 114 Dennis, Ryanaustin 68 Depillars, Murray 66 Dery, Mark 3, 69 Desaulniers, Janet 126 Dessa Rose (Williams) 27 de Weever, Jacqueline 14 “Diaspora” 35, 36 Diaz, Junot 16, 64–83 Dieng, Babacar 10–11 Dillon, Grace 17, 86–87, 112, 114, 115 “Di Mwen, Tell Me” (Senior) 56, 57 Donaldson, Jeff 26, 66 double consciousness, theory of 31, 69 Douglass, Frederick 8, 94 Downwinder Nation Action Group 60 Dozier School 128 Draudt, Alida 54 Du Bois, W. E. B. 15, 22, 23, 30, 45, 69 Ducker, Eric 64 Due, John 126 Due, Patricia Stephens 126 Due, Tananarive 17, 67, 101–112, 125 Duma, Henry 2, 5, 24, 65–67 DuVernay, Ava 127 dystopia 77–83

Edwards, Brent Hayes 2, 35, 39, 118 Eglash, Ron 4 Eisenstein, Sergei 72, 78 El Alailly, Ikbal 6 elephant, in Hopkinson’s story 116–118 Ellis, Thomas Sayers 67, 68 Ellis, Trey 21 Ellison, Ralph 28, 29, 62, 67, 93 Emergent Strategies (Brown) 54 Ernesto, Jada 96, 97 Eshun, Kodwo 23, 24, 77, 86 Eurocentricism 44 fables, postmodern 86–99 Falling in Love with Hominids (Hopkinson) 101–102, 112–118 Fanon, Frantz 2, 5 Faris, Wendy 14, 32–33, 53 Feeling Very Strange: An Anthology of Slipstream (Kessel and Kelly) 86, 87, 88, 90 Film Inquiry (magazine) 64 “film language” 78 Flame Wars (Dery) 3 Flores, Angel 33 Flores (character) 55–57 Flying Lotus 64, 67 Folayn, Sabaah 129 folklore, western association of 33–34 Francis, Terri 13, 39, 110 Franklin, Krista 5, 68 Frelik, Pawel 12, 90 French Surrealists 2 Freud, Sigmund 14, 17, 103 “The Frogs” (Danticat) 52 Fualaau, Vili 104 Fusco, Coco 67, 98 Futurist manifesto 79 Gaëlle (character) 52–53 Gambino, Childish 67 Garuba, Harry 6, 14, 34–35, 36, 37, 39, 42, 102 Gaskins, Nettrice 5, 67 George, Louise (character) 55, 56, 57 Georgia’s Wilcox County High School 102 Ghost Summer (Due) 17–18, 101–112 Giddings, Paula 97 Gilroy, Paul 5, 21, 77 Goldberg, David 4 Golden, Thelma 67 Gomez, Derek 67 González, Jennifer A. 22 Govan, Sandra Y. 4, 55

Index 135 Gracetown, Florida 103, 106, 108–110 graffiti artists 3 Griffiths, Jennifer L. 23 Griffiths, Rachel Eliza 5, 17, 64, 101–102, 118–120 Grimm Brothers 27 grotesque theory 11, 49–50, 52–54, 58 Grundisse (Marx) 28 The Guardian (newspaper) 39, 64 Habermas, Jürgen 91 Hairston, Andrea 110 Halloween (film) 107 Hanisch, Carol 97 Haraway, Donna 55 Harlem Renaissance movement 66 Harris, Michael 66 “The Healer” (Bender) 87 Hegel 22 Heidegger, Martin 23 Henderson, Mae 27 Henderson, Napoleon Jones 66 Henein, George 6 Henry, Adele 94, 95, 99 Henry, Paget 5 Henson, Matthew 29 “Herbal” (Hopkinson) 115 Hitler, Adolf 50 Hogu, Barbara Jones 66 hooks, bell 78, 113, 120 Hopkinson, Nalo 4, 101–102, 112–118 Horn, Misty 95–96, 97–98, 99 horror, immortality and 17, 101–120 Huegerich, Scott 129 Hull, Akasha Gloria 111–112 humor: in AfroSurreal texts 88; in Ghost Summer 101; of “Herbal” 116–117 Hurston, Zora Neale 35, 53, 77 hybridization 23 “The Idea of Black Culture” (Spillers) 1, 22, 102 ILGWU see International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) immortality, horror and 17, 102–120 Inca, La 74 “Indigenous scientific literacies” 114 Installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery, A project of Creative Time, NY 2014 83 Institute for the Future 54 International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) 97 “Introduction: Future Texts” (Nelson) 3

The Intuitionist (Whitehead) 65 Invisible Man (Ellison) 29, 62, 93 Irele, Abiola 4 Issa, Kobayashi 36 Italian Futurist Manifesto 79 Jacobs, Harriett 8 James, Michael 68 Jarrell, Jae 66 Jarrell, Wadsworth 66 Jaynes, Chris 22, 28–29, 30, 31–32 Jennings, John 67 Joans, Ted 2 John, High (slave) 44 John Henry Days (Whitead) 65 Johnson, Christian 68 Johnson, Mat 14–15, 22, 24, 28–29, 30, 32 Jones, Claudia 7 Jordan, June 54 Junior, Max 57 Kaczynski, Asia 59 Kant 22 Karvel, Thomas 30 Kayser, Wolfgang 15, 49–50, 53 Keene, John 67, 68, 70, 87 “Keepin’ It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous” (Kelley) 49 Keith, Naima J. 67 Kelley, Robin D. G. 1, 2–3, 6, 7, 8, 15, 43–44, 49 Kelly, James Patrick 12, 17, 78, 86, 87, 90 Kennedy, Adrienne 2 Kessel, John 12, 17, 78, 86, 87, 90 Kilgore, De Witt Douglas 10, 55 King, Martin Luther 65 King, Nia 68 Kluge, Alexander 26 Kristeva, Julia 14, 27 LaFleur, Abbie 103–106 “The Lake” (Due) 103–104, 106 Lam, Wifredo 1, 41 Lamar, Kendrick 64, 67 Lang, Fritz 80 LaValle, Victor 16–17, 86–99 Lavender, Isiah 71 Lawrence, Carolyn 66 Lawson, Deana 64 Légitime Défense (journal) 2 Léro, Etienne 2 Lethem, Jonathan 88, 89 Levitas, Ruth 110

136 Index “The Library of Babel” (Borges) 86 The Life of William Grimes (Grimes) 53 Life on Mars (Smith) 67 “Light and the Sufferer” (Letham) 88–89 L-I-N-K-E-D (online journal) 68 LIosa, Mario Vargas 50 “literary homeplace” 113, 115 The Living Blood (Due) 126 Lola (Oscar’s sister) 75, 76 The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) 71 Louise George (character) 55, 56, 57 Lowe, Janice 67, 68 Lukcás, György 124 magical realism 10, 11, 12, 14–15, 32–34, 40–41 Mahasha, Phetogo Tshepo 42 Major, Clarence 3 Mansour, Joyce 6 Márquez, Gabriel García 11, 33, 50 Marx, Karl 23, 28, 36 Marxism 7 The Mary Sue (magazine) 64 Mathis, Mahalis 30, 31 The Matrix (film) 73 Mauss, Marcel 76 Mayer, David 72 McAnally, James 125 McCloud, Ken 93 McDonald, Stefan 87 McGee, Art 4 McMillan, Terry 126 McSweeney (journal) 64 Means Coleman, Robin R. 17, 107, 127 memory(ies): Ghost Summer and 112; Griffiths shifting selves and 118–120; psychology of, in Due, Hopkinson, and Griffiths 101–102 Mesens, E. L. T. 6 “Message in a Bottle” (Hopkinson) 115–116 Metropolis (film) 80 Meyerson, Gregory 74 Midnight Robbers (Hopkinson) 112 Miller, D. Scott 5 Miller, Gavin 10 Miller, Paul D. 5 Monae, Janelle 67 Moore, Gordon E. 13 Morrison, Toni 11, 24, 27, 28, 33, 38–39, 98, 123 Moten, Fred 67 “Mountains and Stars” (Brenner) 89 Mueble, Carrie 125

Mules and Men (Hurston) 53 Mullen, Harryette 8 Mulvey, Laura 82 Murai, Hiro 64 My Soul to Keep (Due) 126, 128 My Soul to Take (Due) 126 myths, development of 130–131 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe) 27, 30 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Douglass) 94 Nation (Lawson) 64 Native slipstream, as defined by Dillon 86 Neal, Larry 21 Negritude 4 Negt, Oskar 26 Nelson, Alondra 3–4, 55 Never Catch Me (Murai) 64 New Black Aesthetic 21 Newton, Huey 96 Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble 68 Nightmare on Elm Street (film) 107 Night of the Living Dead (film) 79, 81 Nin, Anaïs 122, 124 Njoroge, Njoroge 25 Novak, Kim 39 The Novel of the Future (Nin) 122 Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe 38 Oakland’s Black Aesthetic 68 Oakland Tales (Brenner) 16–18, 86–99 Ojetade, Balogun 110 Okorafor, Nnedi 86 Okpala, Jude Chudi 33 Okri, Ben 33 Olugebefola, Ademola 67 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez) 11 Ong, Walter 27–28 “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party” (Cleaver) 93 Ottaway, David 76 Ottaway, Marina 76 Oyeyemi, Helen 14–15, 22, 24, 27, 36–43, 45 Panthers’ Community 96, 97 Parable of the Sower (Butler) 10 Paul D. (slave) 39 Pérer, Benjamin 41 Peters, Dirk 30, 31 Pew Research Center 22 Philadelphia’s Black Quantum Futurists 68

Index 137 Phillips, James 66 Phillips, Rasheedah 4, 28, 29, 54, 68 Photography and Surrealism (Bate) 26 Pietri, Arturo Ulsar 40 Poe, Edgar Allan 14, 27, 30–31 Poltergeist (film) 107 primitivism: boy snow bird and rethinking 32–44; industrialized country and 27–28; modernity, society, progress, and 41 “protest literature” 21 pscyhology of reimagining the past 14–15 Pym (Johnson) 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 32; language of 27, 29–30 Quan, H. L. T. 58, 117, 120 Quayson, Ato 14, 50, 116 Ra, Sun 67 Race, Religion, and War (Sell) 2 racisim 32, 45 Ramirez, Catherine 28 Redmond, Eugene 2, 24 Redwood and Wildfire (Hairston) 110 Reed, Ishamel 3, 4 Refusal of the Shadwo: Surrealism and the Caribbean (Richardson) 2 Richardson, Michael 1, 25 Riley, Boots 5, 64 Robinson, Cedric 7, 43 Roger, Mitchell 27–28 Rosemont, Franklin 1, 6, 7, 15, 68 Rosemont, Penelope 68 Ross Ice Shelf 30 Rothman, Roger 119 Saldías, Gabriel 110 Sandra Bland concert 67 Sasser, Kim 43 Saunders, George 87 Savage, Augusta 26 Schmidt, Eric 13 Schmitz, Mary Katherine 104 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 67, 68, 69 Schroeder, Shannon 11–12 Schwartz, Shiela 126 science, AfroSurrealism and 57–58 scopophilia, theory of 82–83 Seale, Bobby 96 “Sea Oak” (Sunders) 87 The Secret History of Las Vegas (Abani) 15, 49–62

The Secret History of Science Fiction (eds. Kelly and Kessel) 78, 87 Sell, Mike 2, 25, 26, 44 Selzer, Linda 65 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 2 Senior, Max 56–58 Sethe (slave) 39 The Shadows took Shape (exhibition) 67 Shawl, Nisi 96 The Shining (film) 107 Shockley, Evie 4, 29 Simpson, Serena 125 Singh, Sunil 58–62 Slate (magazine) 39, 54, 64 slipstream, AfroSurrealism and 12, 86–99 Slovak Surrealists 32 Smith, Cauleen 68 Smith, Frank 66 Smith, Tracy K. 67 SNCC see Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Snow White (Taylor) 27 social change: AfroSurrealism and 10–18 social justice: Dark Room Collective and 68; technology and 55–57 “sociomental space” 77–78 Solange 67 Solarik, Bruno 32 Sorry to Bother You (Riley) 64, 65 The Souls of Black Folks (Du Bois) 15, 45 Space is the Place (film) 6 Spiderman (film) 73 Spillers, Hortense 1, 9, 22, 102 The Spirit of Carnival (Danow) 50 spirituality, in LaValle’s novel 94 Spitz, Mark 70, 78, 79, 80–83 Star Wars (film) 73 Steamfunk! (Davis and Ojetade) 110 Stephens, Kofi Davie 106–107, 108, 109–110, 111–112 Stephens, Robert 128 Sterling, Bruce 12, 17 Stevens, Nelson 66 “Story to Tell” (Huegerich) 129 Strange, Sharan 57, 67, 68 Stroffolino, Chris 68 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 97 Styron, William 27 The Substance of Hope, Cobb’s 22–23 Sundquist, Eric 29 Sun Ra (Rosemont and Kelley) 6

138 Index Surrealism 21–24, 32; about 1–2; AfroSurrealism as subset of 123; AfroSurrealism vs 123–124; black 64; Caribbean 44; Latin magical realism and 40–41; Tythacott and 41 Surrealists, black 2 Suvin, Darko 71 Swamp Angels 89, 92, 93, 94 Sylvain, Patrick 68 SZA 67 Tal, Kalf 9 Tate, Claudia 23 Taussig, Michael 33 Taylor, Clyde R. 124 Taylor, Edgar 27 technology, social justice and 55–57 Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger) 24–25 Thomas, Lorenzo 123 Thomas, Sheree Renée 4, 13–14 Thomas, Terry 26 Till, Emmett 11, 43, 109 Timmons, Isaac 108, 109 Timmons brothers 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Todorov, Tzvetan 8, 71–72 Torres-Saillant, Silvio 64 “Transracial Writing for the Sincere” (Shawl) 96 Trotsky, Leon 44 Troupe, Quincy 5 Trujillo, Rafael 71, 73–74, 75, 76 Tudor, Rachel 33, 43 Tul, Kali 4 Tutuola, Amos 3 Twelve Million Black Voices (Wright) 7 Tythacott, Louise 1, 9–10, 41 Unveiling Vision (exhibition) 67 “Urgently Visible: Why Black Lives Matter” (Allen) 122 van Veen, Tobias C. 28, 67 Varda, Agnès 72 Vernon Keeve’s Association of Black and Brown writers 68 Ville Rose village 50, 52–53 Viot, Jacques 25 Visual images, Dark Room Collective and 68

visual technologies 73–77, 77–83 von Franz, Marie-Louise 14, 32 “Wade in the Water” spiritual 26 Walcott, Derek 67 Walker, Kara 83 The Walking Dead (Kirkman) 79 Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (Dillon) 112 Washburn, Judah 94 Washburn Library 89, 92, 93, 94, 95 water, in Ghost Summer 111–112 Water Goddess, Alan Clark’s 51 Watson, Veronica 25 Weefur, Leila 68 Weems, Carrie Mae 66 Weheliye, Alexander G. 4, 67, 79 Wells, Ida B. 108 WEUSI arts 66–67 Whack, Tierra 67 “White Alice” (character) 58–59, 61 Whitehead, Colson 16, 64–83 White Streets (documentary) 129 Whitley, Zoe 67 Whitman, Olivia 38 Whose Streets and All Hands on Deck (Davis) 129 Widdifield, Hannah 40 Williams, Sherley Anne 27 “Winfredo Lam and the Lost Origins of the Jungle” (Adrián) 1 Wolin, Richard 23 Womack, Ytasha L. 4 Woman after Her Last Wound (Griffiths) 17, 64, 101–102, 118–120, 119 Woodson, Jon 2 Wright, John S. 65–66 Wright, Richard 7 Yoruba culture 130 Yoruba religion 37 Younane, Ramses 6 Young, Skip Dine 72 Youngblood, Brea 130 Ytasha Womack’s AfroFuturism 67 Yunior 75, 76 Žižek, Slavoj 28 zombies 70–71, 77–82 Zone One (Colson) 16, 64–83