Afrofuturism and black feminism are symbiotic strategies in nature.

In “Black to the Future” (1993), Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses AfricanAmerican concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (180). Since then, an increasing body of Afrofuturist scholarship has emerged and expanded upon Dery’s coinage of the term, particularly in terms of genre spectrum and even medium, as scholars continue to study Afrofuturism from a musical perspective.3 Given that Afrofuturism profoundly challenges ideas about science, technology, and knowledge, many afrofuturist texts do not fit neatly into the conventions of science fiction and actually borrow from other speculative genres such as fantasy, magical realism, horror, and so on. 4 In a recent essay, Julia Hoydis argues that the literary tradition of black female writers of speculative fiction that started with Octavia Butler produces a “hybridization of genres.” Hoydis claims that women in Afrofuturism especially are “more concerned with speculation and disturbing notions of reality than with scientific-technological ideas and ... they often maintain a concern with history despite a distinctly futurist orientation” (71). Certainly, Hopkinson’s work does not escape such definitions; as Rob Latham puts it: [c]ritics have been hard-pressed to come up with an adequate critical vocabulary to describe the complex genre-crossing involved in [Hopkinson’s] work. Is she producing variants of magic realism? Adaptations of the folk tale to technocultural realities? Futuristic fables? The short answer is that she is doing all of these things, and more. (338) In addition, as Hoydis aptly remarks, “a Hopkinson novel ... [typically] features characters of all ethnicities, ages, genders, and sexual orientations” (81). In his definition of the movement in the Oxford Companion to Science Fiction, De Witt Douglas Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be seen as less a marker of black authenticity and more a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unthought assumptions about what histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we may imagine” (8). Kilgore’s definition is particularly probing because it underlines the afrofuturist project of contesting the idea of linear time and subsequently subverting the primitivism/modernity binary. Recent works by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek re-examine nineteenth-century novels as afrofuturist5 ; other scholars such as Yatasha L. Womack and Kodwo Eshun argue that the Afrodiaspora was a science-fictional experience.6 Lonny Avi Brooks suggests such retroactive analysis when he writes that “Afrofuturism as a basic framework suggests promising directions for reinvigorating our language to speak about racial identity in the deep past and the long-term future” (153). Afrofuturist texts subvert images of a post-racial future in which technology and modernism have allowed white people to survive and racialized others to fade away. 7 But they also reclaim historical narratives, particularly traumatic histories such as the African diaspora and US slavery, and play with time and time travel in ways that do not allow for a simple conception of time as linear. Considering the engagement of afrofuturist texts with histories of racism, slavery, colonialization, and systemic oppression, as well as the position of racialized bodies in stories set in the future, it is crucial to analyze the conjunction of race, gender, and sexuality. In her recent essay “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledging,” Susana Morris argues that Afrofuturism and black feminism share similar preoccupations with resistance to systemic oppression and erasure, so much so that they are “symbiotic” (153). She defines “Afrofuturist feminism” as “a literary tradition in which people of African descent and transgressive, feminist practices born of or from across the Afrodiaspora are key to a progressive future.” She writes further that Afrofuturist feminism “offers a critical epistemology that illuminates the working of black speculative fiction in vital ways” (153).8 Morris applies her theory to the works of Octavia Butler, whom she sees as a prime example of an author whose fiction is both Afrofuturist and profoundly engaged with the concerns at stake in black feminism, namely race, gender, sexuality, and ability (154-55).