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The genre of science fiction has often been hostile to readers who are not white, middle class, heterosexual men. Though the genre has historically ignored Dark Others; however, they are never completely omitted from the story, as they are often characterized as the creature, the alien, or the monster. In this way, the futuristic windows and mirrors available to Black women and girls are often cracked, tiny, or shattered. The primary objective of this paper, then, is to further conversations about the need for diverse books and genres in schools by focusing on the science fiction reading histories of Black women and highlighting the features that draw Black women to the genre. The reading histories of Black women can provide further data that showcases the need for new mythologies, ones that center Dark Others prospering in the future.

Purpose This paper aims to identify how white preservice teachers’ inability to imagine an equitable space for Black and Brown children contributes to the ubiquity of whiteness in English education. Further, the authors contend that the preservice teachers’ responses mirror how the larger field of English education fails to imagine Black and Brown life. Design/methodology/approach Using abolitionist teaching as a guide, the authors use reflexive thematic analysis to examine the rhetorical moves their preservice teachers made to defer responsibility for anti-racist teaching. Findings The findings show preservice teachers’ rhetorical moves across three themes: failure to imagine Black and Brown humanity, failure to imagine a connection between theory and practice, and failure to imagine curriculum and schooling beyond whiteness. Originality/value By highlighting how preservice teachers fail to imagine spaces for Black and Brown youth, this study offers another pathway through which teacher educators, teachers and English education programs can assist their faculty and students in activating their imaginations in the pursuit of anti-racist, abolitionist teaching.

In this article, we argue that the humanity and mattering of Black people have always lived in Black girlhood, but the potentiality of Black girlhood as a creative space for designing Black approaches in educational research has yet to be fully realized. Therefore, we (re)turn to Black girlhood frameworks and theories in our contribution to Black approaches in educational research. Looking to where Black girls live and be (re)defines notions of human, humanity, humanness, and living for it begins at Black girl epistemes. Following Wynter’s call for a new humanness, one that promises liberatory futures, we offer Project-Praxes of Black Girl Otherworld-Making to scholars and researchers occupying educational space, considering their/our responsibility and answerability firstly to Black people, and secondly, to the fields of Black Studies, Black Girlhood Studies, and education in a transdisciplinary sense. Project-Praxes of Black Girl Otherworld-Making includes the following seven pursuits: (1) humanness outside the white gaze and after Man; (2) remembering where Black girlhoods lived; (3) ethical engagements with Black girl(s)/hoods; (4) Black girlhood approaches in educational research; (5) reflexivity in doing freedom work in unfree places/spaces; (6) transdisciplinary intellectual rendezvouses that seriously read and cite Black women; and (7) writing with regard for the spectrum of legibility. Through Project-Praxes of Otherworld-Making, Black girls can show up as their most authentic selves and fully expect the same of us as researchers. This framework is not invested in projects of changing, fixing, or colonizing young Black girls. We instead acknowledge that they already have the language to express how they feel and what they know. We hold their descriptions as truth and learn from them to honor their/our lives in the work. Project-Praxes of Otherworld-Making makes possible Black girls’ humanity and freedom dreaming.

All activism is science fiction, for envisioning a world without oppression requires the active creation of socially just societies formed from innovative ideas and visionary possibilities. Black girls have historically engaged in science fiction by using their voices and written words to construct socially just worlds in hopes that their dreams of the future can become realities. Still, there is scant research centering how Black girls use fiction writing, generally, and science fiction writing, specifically, as a social justice practice. Drawing from a larger narrative inquiry project with the objective of determining how Black girls might use written and oral storytelling to discuss, critique, and subvert experiences with social in/justice, this article connects the Black Radical Imagination and Critical Race English Education to consider the science fiction short stories of three Black girls. In focusing on these stories, I explore how Black girls’ science fiction writing is grounded in their ways of being and knowing, but also how this writing foregrounds their freedom dreams. Further, I provide insight into how English teachers and literacy researchers can alter pedagogical practices to make space for Black girls’ dreams.

Popular culture aids in the conditioning of U.S. society, assisting in the determination of who is esteemed as literate and who is disgraced with illiteracy. Unfortunately, pop culture depictions of black male literacy often reify the stereotype that black males are less literate than their peers. Although a real issue presents itself in the opportunity gap that exists between black males and other racial groups, however, focusing on the negative fails to complicate the narrative. The purpose of this article is to confound monolithic representations by acknowledging positive, nuanced, and complex black male literacy practices. The author uses critical rhetorical analysis and positioning theory to highlight Netflix's Luke Cage series as a site where empowering literacy practices prevail. For educators, the author suggests using a critical rhetorical analysis of popular culture to examine and question content that presents static representations of black male literacy.

Abstract The rampant murder of Black women and girls in the United States proves that this place is not safe for them. In fact, it is questionable whether any space currently known can be safe when antiblackness and misogynoir are interwoven into the fabric of our world. For this reason, researchers must explore the unbound landscapes Black girls create for themselves in fantastic narratives. In this article, I examine the fantasy short stories of two Black middle school girls who participated in a writing workshop to explore how they resisted spatial control by creating new worlds they had the power to construct and dismantle.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to further theorize BlackCrit to include a deeper focus on the framing idea of Black liberatory fantasy via Afrofuturism. Design/methodology/approach To develop the theoretical connections, the author revisits their previous scholarship on Black girls’ Afrofuturist storytelling practices to elucidate how the girls used their speculative narratives to critique the antiblackness present in their schools and the world at large and to create future worlds in which they have the power to create the world anew. Findings This paper discusses the relationship between BlackCrit and Afrofuturism by considering three interrelated ideas: how Afrofuturism acknowledges the antiblackness embedded in the USA; how BlackCrit makes space for liberatory Black futures and otherwise worlds; and how each theoretical idea inherently complements the other. Originality/value This paper creatively uses a hip hop album as a foundation for the portrayal of the intricate connections between Black pasts, presents and futures. As a conceptual paper, it pushes educators and researchers to consider the call and response between antiblackness and Black futurity.

Hadley and Toliver reflect on their own past classroom text selections and practices to illustrate their unintentional complicity in upholding whiteness within their classrooms. They examine two characters from novels, Daisy from The Great Gatsby and Mildred from Fahrenheit 451, to better understand how pedagogical evasion is a form of complicity, how that complicity can compound itself when unexamined, and how they are currently conceptualizing resistance to complicity by embracing a continuously critical approach to texts and pedagogy. The Daisy-esque approach to teaching is a common form of pedagogical evasion, but if they don't continuously examine their own pedagogy, their pedagogical avoidance can become even more explicit and problematic. In their case, they taught books they felt nostalgia and love for because of their prior teaching and reading experiences. Like Daisy, they winked at the issues in hopes that their students would love the books as much as they did. Like Mildred, they avoided any possible discussion that would remove them from the fantasy world they had created for themselves, a world in which these books and these characters were essential to their classroom.

[...]Alice read to her mother every day. [...]my intentions did not align with the girls' needs. [...]by the end of the semester, the girls transformed the independent reading book club into a communal read-aloud. Reading Aloud in the Book Club During the first book club meeting, the girls selected the book we would read first. Because I had to purchase the books, I knew we could not have read anything by our second meeting. Black Girl Read-Alouds Are Communal At the end of the semester, I individually interviewed two of the book club participants. Because I had initially planned for independent reading time, one of my focal questions concerned the shift between independent and collaborative reading.

\"The Hunger Games\" (S. Collins, 2008) is one of the best-selling fiction books for young people in the United States (Calta, 2014). Although classified as dystopian literature, \"The Hunger Games\" is situated within the larger literary category of science fiction, a genre often defined by the presence of strange, yet plausible, innovations; the manifestation of extrapolative and realistic possibilities; and the interpretation of themes and issues in modern society through a futuristic lens. Each of these elements creates a space for readers to challenge their conceptions of normalcy and to confront dominant modes of thought to which they have grown accustomed (McKitterick, 2015). However, readers often reach a point where the challenge becomes too great, a point where they cannot move beyond their comfort zones because they have been socialized to embrace narrowed views of the world and the people who inhabit it. This juncture is the level of alterity. Alterity is created when texts ask readers to push beyond their comfort zones in order to understand concepts that require them to expand their beliefs. An example of a response to alterity is exemplified in several Twitter reactions written by young adolescents in response to Rue's casting in the film adaptation of \"The Hunger Games.\" In the novel, S. Collins (2008) first describes Rue as having \"dark brown skin and eyes\" (p. 45), and she later writes that Rue has \"bright, dark eyes and satiny brown skin\" (p. 98). Both descriptions indicate that Rue could be a Black girl. However, even though the description of Rue's skin color is explicit, some readers envisioned a young, innocent White girl. Essentially, the characterization of Rue reached a level of alterity so great for some readers that they could not \"see\" her as Black when they read the novel. Upon the film's release, readers were forced to see Rue as Black because the actor Amandla Stenberg assumed the role of the young female character. With Stenberg functioning in the role of Rue, Collins's novel descriptions came to life; yet, some readers refused to accept her characterization, even with a visual from the film and a description from the book. They refused to embrace the challenge of understanding why they believed Rue to be White even though Collins provided obvious racial descriptions. Instead, they commented about the inaccuracy of the film adaptation and openly described how the character they imagined while reading was not the character that played the role in the film. Their responses to alterity were hindered by their inability to push past their comfort zones. They did not have the tools necessary to deconstruct their previous belief systems. Critically analyzing Rue's characterization in \"The Hunger Games,\" S. R. Toliver investigates how societally embedded discourses can influence a reader's ability to perceive Black girls as young, childlike, and innocent.