Critical Futures: Creative Interventions and Revolutionary Possibilities – serie

This book is a provocative and fresh look into how Black women display an authentic identity in the face of constant negative images and portrayals of themselves in the media over time. Idrissa N. Snider explores noteworthy occurrences when prominent Black women, including First Lady Michelle Obama, Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis, and Grammy-winning songstress Beyonce Knowles, have used their platforms and notoriety to push back against age-old stereotypes used to justify their subjugation and mistreatment, such as the mammie, angry black woman, jezebel, or the tragic mulatto. Snider emphasizes and honors how Black women uniquely identify as a form of resistance and positive self-actualization and argues that both everyday and socially elite Black women and girls can – and do – utilize self-definition to disrupt and reject inauthentic and harmful representations of themselves.

Future Spaces of Power explores political, cultural, and societal narratives of future space(s) on a global scale to complicate the cultural logic of systemic futures that exist outside the boundaries of dominant political imaginaries.Contributors critically engage with alternative visions found in literature, film, and other cultural artifacts that encourage us to either live with or escape from the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and late capitalism and consider what these alternative visions might do – or fail to do – in combating anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism. Through these analyses, the volume collectively argues that anti-postmodern and postmodern readings of future spaces overlook the everyday lived experiences of certain bodies – including chronic health problems, effects from systemic racism, and other experiences of insecurity, fear, and death in the face of institutionalized violence – by disregarding differential experiences of time within different spatial contexts.Contributors suggest that critiques of narratives occurring within and about virtual and metaspaces, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and even the colonization of outer space can provide critical insights concerning global futures and our perceptions of space and time, especially as they inform how we should live in the present amid environmental destruction, information capitalism, neoliberalism, and the remaining infrastructures of colonialism. Ultimately, this book interrogates how a variety of media shape and inform our understanding and assumptions about conceptualizations of future space(s) as it demonstrates how governmentality eliminates and regulates surplus bodies – both overtly and covertly – through the technological, spatial, discursive, and temporal management of space.

Engaging with Octavia Butler’s iconic texts Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Scott C. Emerson argues that Earthseed, the religion Octavia Butler creates through the literary imagination of protagonist Lauren Olamina, acts as a manifesto for revolutionary masculinities.Emerson contests that Butler’s textual landscape is the convergence of catastrophes that exhibit the extreme results of western societal oppression and its reluctance to address growing racial, colonial, gender, economic, and ableist conditions. Earthseed emerges from the imagination of Lauren as a rejection of and solution to societal chaos. Using Afrofuturism and performativity as theoretical departure points, the author analyzes Earthseed as a masculinity manifesto via six tenets—anti-establishmentism, collectivity, self-reflexivity, intentional action, flexibility, and anti-hegemonic masculinity.