Heartiest congratulations to Rhonda D. Frederick, who Evidence of Things Not Seen: Black Fantastic in Genre Fiction was published this July by Rutgers University Press. This critical exploration of speculative fiction includes chapters on the work of Barbara Neely, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colin Channer.
Meredith Gadsby (author of Soaking the Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration and Survival) writes: “With the brilliance of James Baldwin’s cultural critique as a conceptual framework, Frederick’s ‘black fantastic’ challenges the constraints offered by colonial efforts to diminish African subjectivities. Instead, Frederick shows us how black writers of dark fantastic explore the contours of African identities made possible without the dehumanization of the colonial project. This contribution to the study of black speculative fiction is certainly a tour de force.”
Description: Evidence of Things Not Seen: Blackness Fantastic in Genre Fictions is an interdisciplinary study of blackness in American genre literature. The “fantastic” in fantastic darkness is conceived by an unrestrained imagination because it lives, despite any attempt at annihilation. This blackness amazes you because it rejects the boundaries of anti-blackness. As operationalized in this project, fantastical blackness is an ethical practice that centers black self-awareness as a point of departure rather than a reaction to dominant threatening or diminishing narratives.
Mystery, romance, fantasy, mixed genres, and the unfettered imaginations of science fiction deeply communicate this quality of darkness, especially here through the work of Barbara Neely, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colin Channer. When black writers centralize this expressive quality, they make fantastic blackness available to a wide audience that then uses its imaginal vocabularies to reshape extraliterary realities. After all, the imaginable possibilities of popular genres provide strategies through which they can be made real.
RHODA FREDERICK is an associate professor of African and African diaspora studies and English at Boston College in Massachusetts. She is the author of “Colón Man a Come”: Mythographies of Panama Canal Migration.
For more information, see https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/evidence-of-things-not-seen/9781978818064
