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Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an African American writer, essayist, Civil Rights activist, legal-stenography businessman, and lawyer whose novels and short stories explore race, racism, and the problematic contours of African Americans' social and cultural identities in post-Civil War South. He was the first African American to be published by a major American publishing house and served as a beacon-point for future African American writers. The Colonel's Dream, written in 1905, is a compelling tale of the post-Civil War South's degeneration into a region awash with virulent racist practices against African Americans: segregation, lynchings, disenfranchisement, convict-labor exploitation, and endemic violent repression. The events in this novel are powerfully depicted from the point of view of a philanthropic but unreliable southern white colonel. Upon his return to the South, the colonel learns to abhor this southern world, as a tale of vicious racism unfolds. Throughout this narrative, Chesnutt confronts the deteriorating position of African Americans in an increasingly hostile South. Upon its publication The Colonel's Dream was considered too controversial and unpalatable because of its bitter criticisms of southern white prejudice and northern indifference, and so this groundbreaking story failed to gain public attention and acclaim. This is the first scholarly edition of The Colonel's Dream. It includes an introduction and notes by R. J. Ellis and works to reestablish this great novel's reputation. 

With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

One of the most compelling, yet little known stories of race relations in the twentieth century is the account of blacks who chose to leave the United States to be involved in the Soviet Experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. Frustrated by the limitations imposed by racism in their home country, African Americans were lured by the promise of opportunity abroad. A number of them settled there, raised families, and became integrated into society. The Soviet economy likewise reaped enormous benefits from the talent and expertise that these individuals brought, and the all around success story became a platform for political leaders to boast their party goals of creating a society where all members were equal.In Blacks, Reds, and Russians, Joy Gleason Carew offers insight into the political strategies that often underlie relationships between different peoples and countries. She draws on the autobiographies of key sojourners, including Harry Haywood and Robert Robinson, in addition to the writings of Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. Interviews with the descendents of figures such as Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden offer rare personal insights into the story of a group of emigrants who, confronted by the daunting challenges of making a life for themselves in a racist United States, found unprecedented opportunities in communist Russia.

I began writing about power because I had so little, Octavia E. Butler once said. Butler's life as an African American woman--an alien in American society and among science fiction writers--informed the powerful works that earned her an ardent readership and acclaim both inside and outside science fiction. Gerry Canavan offers a critical and holistic consideration of Butler's career. Drawing on Butler's personal papers, Canavan tracks the false starts, abandoned drafts, tireless rewrites, and real-life obstacles that fed Butler's frustrations and launched her triumphs. Canavan departs from other studies to approach Butler first and foremost as a science fiction writer working within, responding to, and reacting against the genre's particular canon. The result is an illuminating study of how an essential SF figure shaped themes, unconventional ideas, and an unflagging creative urge into brilliant works of fiction.

In her recent historical fiction, Take My Hand (2022), New York Times bestselling author Dolen Perkins-Valdez explores the specific manifestations of post-slavery racism, particularly institutional racism. This is vividly portrayed through the experiences of Civil Townsend, a determined new nurse, who witnesses the systematic denial of reproductive rights and autonomy among impoverished African American females. Due to the novel being published within the last two years, there is a significant lack of extensive scholarly analysis on its critical themes. This research employs the postcolonial concept of Otherness to examine the oppression of black women in the narratives. It investigates how stereotyping and dehumanizing as facets of Otherness within a postcolonial framework, contribute to their oppression. It also gives an analysis of the causes and consequences of the practice of Othering. The study offers insights into the power dynamics between the dominant and marginalized racial groups, underscoring the persistent battle against racial stereotypes and institutional racism. The conclusions of this research underscore the notion that the ideology of Otherness is central to the oppression experienced by the African American female characters in the novel. It advocates that achieving equality involves recognizing and respecting differences ideologically.

This article analyzes Colum McCann's biofiction TransAtlantic (2013), which it reads alongside Colson Whitehead's speculative historical fiction The Underground Railroad (2016) in order to bring into sharp focus the kind of cultural, political, and intellectual service that biofiction by or about African Americans can perform. By lifting the veil from the mechanisms of oppressive power, these two novels expose common structures that were operational during the slave trade in Africa as well as the \"starve trade\" in Ireland. My main conceptual building block is Ian Baucom's model of two poles of realism (\"actuarial\" and \"melancholy\"), which I expand to suggest that McCann and Whitehead complicate this polarity, allowing the actuarial mode to integrate liberation strategies for the oppressed and nuancing the melancholy mode to circumvent the risk of sentimentalism. In both cases, the strength of interracial agency and intersectional thought points toward lines of flight from the actuarial-melancholic binary.

Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) is a contemporary African American novel that has often been interpreted as either utopian, dystopian, or a gothic piece of literature. Scrutinizing the non-linearity of time in Paradise and connecting it to the historical events at the time the novel was written, we wish to highlight Morrison’s criticism of Eurocentric utopian traditions. Furthermore, we emphasize Morrison’s suggestion of reimagining a reconstructed future through re-examining African American history. By analyzing tropes of metaphorical time travel, parallel universes, and the jump in time integrated with the technology of the 1970s when the events of the novel occurred, we suggest that Paradise can be tackled from an Afrofuturistic lens to visualize a different future. Hence, we argue that Paradise is an Afrofuturistic novel that helps readers envision a new form of Reconstruction through mediating between African American history and technoculture.

This paper examines a number of African-authored narratives (novels and film) in the light of recent thinking about futurism and the role of speculative fiction as a means of envisioning the future. Uppinder Mehan, coeditor of the first ever anthology of “postcolonial science fiction and fantasy,” So Long Been Dreaming, notes that postcolonial writing has rarely “pondered that strange land of the future” and warns, “If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again” (Mehan 270). Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, expands on this to argue that, while the “practice of countermemory as . . . an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten” has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by “contemporary African artists . . . [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act” (292). The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extrarealist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. The turn from mythic revisioning to speculative fiction as a distinct and recognizable genre in the 21st century has notably been embraced by women writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, in whose work gender/femininity is a determinant in the projection of imagined futures. The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those characterized, for example, by genocide, civil war, cross-continental migration, urban dereliction, xenophobia, violence, and the occult) and the potential futures to which they point. The paper argues, therefore, that such narratives, rather than being relegated to the category of fantasy, deserve attention as key indicators of futuristic thinking.

This special issue is dedicated to Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift (2019), and the introduction makes a case for reading the book as a disruptive novel. While the degree of its disruptiveness is a moot point, the novel displays a formal innovativeness that stems not from doing something entirely new but from recycling old art forms and mixing genres, re-asking old (un)answered questions, embracing open-endedness and engaging with the contradictory. In its handling of multiple narrative voices, the novel opens up, among other issues, possibilities for countering historical origins, unnarrating the nation and disbelonging to it. I first present the triadic logic underlying The Old Drift's formal and thematic choices in eight fragments that sometimes include close readings. I reserve the discussion of the implications of my argument on scholarly debates and African letters for last, choosing to first engage in a critical appraisal of the text. I also articulate my motivation for putting together this special issue under the rubric of disruption and trace the links in the articles contained herein.