Visionary Fiction and the Possibilities for Black Feminist Futurity

• In Event: What is kept and what must be left behind?: Afro-futurist feminisms across Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Speculative fiction

Abstract

This paper connects the discourse on black feminist futurity with adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s call for “visionary fiction” to unearth a method for social justice community building. The science fiction anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction for Social Movements envisions new applications of imaginative decolonial epistemologies for social transformation. The stories and authors reflect a transnational feminist praxis where political actors organize around what Maylei Blackwell (et al, 2015: 7) calls “unaligned geographies of difference.” Authors utilize speculative fiction as a form of collective, imaginative organizing that bridges “internal social, cultural, and structural differences” (Blackwell et al, 2015: 7).

Presenter

• Mako Ward, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University