Out of This World: Shining Light on Black Authors in Every Genre

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From Publishers Weekly:

This February saw numerous articles and lists touting the work of award-winning black authors, and works that have quite literally shaped the narrative for black people of the diaspora. We’ll hear names such as Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglass, and Langston Hughes. Their contributions are and should be forever venerated in the canon of literature.

What we didn’t hear as much about are the writers of genre fiction: thrillers, romance, and in particular, science fiction and fantasy. Why is this relevant? In the last decade, sci-fi and fantasy narratives have taken the media by storm. Marvel has been dominating the box office, Game of Thrones had us glued to our TVs and Twitter feeds (Black Twitter’s #demthrones hashtag in particular had me rolling), and people are making seven-figure salaries playing video games online. It’s a good time to be a nerd. The world is finally coming to appreciate the unique appeal of science fiction and fantasy. It’s wondrous, fun, escapist and whimsical, dazzling and glamorous. It takes the mundane and makes it cool. And for the longest time it’s been very Eurocentric. With sci-fi and fantasy growing exponentially more popular year by year, it’s necessary that, alongside black fiction’s rich history of award-winning literary giants, we also shine the spotlight on black works of speculative fiction.

Narratives like Roots, Beloved, and Twelve Years a Slave unflinchingly depict the horrors of slavery.

. . . .

But when the only stories about black people that are given prominence are the ones where black people are abused and oppressed, a very specific and limiting narrative is created for us and about us. And this narrative is one of the means through which the world perceives black people and, worse, through which we perceive ourselves.

It should be noted that black literary fiction does not focus exclusively on black suffering—far from it. The beauty of black literature is that black characters are centered and nuanced, and sci-fi and fantasy narratives can build on that. Through sci-fi and fantasy, we can portray ourselves as mages, bounty hunters, adventurers, and gods. And in the case of sci-fi narratives set in the future, as existing—period.

Sci-fi stories in particular are troubling for their absence of those melanated. Enter Afrofuturism, a term first used in the 1990s in an essay by a white writer named Mark Dery. In a 2019 talk on Afrofuturism at Wellesley College, sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany breaks down what the term meant at the time—essentially fiction set in the future with black characters present. Delany also explains why this is potentially problematic: “[Afrofuturism was] not contingent on the race of the writer, but on the race of the characters portrayed.” 

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG is reading a fantasy/scifi series that features various types and classes of highly-intelligent bipeds. In the book, some are described, in part, by their skin colors which include brown and black. There are no characters described as having white skin.

However, there is nothing to distinguish the characters with brown or black skins from any of the other characters. There are classes of characters with more magical powers than other classes, but no correlation between those skin color and powers. In fact, blue, pink and green-colored races have a lower power status than the classes that include brown or black skins and those classes with white skin also comprise the lowest strata of society.

PG has not been able to discern any particular messages associated with those characters with brown or black skin. They’re just tossed in hear and there. Personally, he finds nothing objectionable about this practice. This is fantasy, after all, with worlds, people, magic and technology that don’t exist or have any obvious corollaries on the planet earth. If the author had attempted to inject issues pertinent to 21st century earth, it would have seemed out of place and potentially have disrupted the suspension of disbelief that accompanies fantasy, scifi and a variety of other fiction genres.