Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction

One of Brittle Paper's 100 Notable African Books of 2024

In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.

Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa.

Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more.

Contributing authors - Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen - offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms.

The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.

Auteur

Eugen Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is an African Australian author of Writing Speculative Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury, 2019) and several novels and fiction collections. She is a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, and her Danged Black Thing was a finalist in the 2023 BSFA, Foreword, Aurealis and Australian Shadows Awards, and made the Otherwise Award Honor List. Her recent books include Mage of Fools (novel), Chasing Whispers (collection) and An Earnest Blackness (essays).

Visit her website at eugenbacon.com and Twitter feed at @EugenBacon.