Evidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions

By Rhonda D. Frederick

Evidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions is an interdisciplinary study of blackness in genre literature of the Americas. The “fantastical” in fantastical blackness is conceived by an unrestrained imagination because it lives, despite every attempt at annihilation. This blackness amazes because it refuses the limits of anti-blackness. As put to work in this project, fantastical blackness is an ethical praxis that centers black self-knowledge as a point of departure rather than as a reaction to threatening or diminishing dominant narratives. Mystery, romance, fantasy, mixed-genre, and science fictions’ unrestrained imaginings profoundly communicate this quality of blackness, specifically here through the work of Barbara Neely, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colin Channer. When black writers center this expressive quality, they make fantastical blackness available to a broad audience that then uses its imaginable vocabularies to reshape extra-literary realities. Ultimately, popular genres’ imaginable possibilities offer strategies through which the made up can be made real.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978818088

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Cover: Evidence of Things Not Seen, Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions by Rhonda D. Frederick

Evidence of Things Not Seen

Evidence of Things Not Seen

Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions

RHONDA D. FREDERICK

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Frederick, Rhonda D., 1965– author.

Title: Evidence of things not seen : fantastical Blackness in genre fictions / Rhonda D. Frederick.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021044042 | ISBN 9781978818064 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978818071 (hardback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978818088 (epub) | ISBN 9781978818095 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978818101 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Blacks in literature. | American fiction—African American authors—History and criticism. | American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | American fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Blacks—Race identity. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PS374.B635 F74 2022 | DDC 813.009/352996073—dc23/eng/20220111

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044042

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Rhonda D. Frederick

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is a present/future rememory of what black people know

Contents

Prologue: Revelations in Black … and Popular

Introduction

1 First—Mystery: Fantastically Black Blanche White: BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam

2 Second—Urban Romantica: Making Black and Jamaican Love: Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain and Romance-ified Diaspora Identities

3 Third—Fantasy: Fantastic Possibilities: Theorizing National Belonging through Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

4 Fourth—Multigenre: Seeing White: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

5 Fifth—Fantasy, Short Story: Fantastically Black Woman: Nalo Hopkinson’s A Habit of Waste

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Prologue

Revelations in Black … and Popular

What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what everyone is saying, doing, thinking—whoever everyone happens to be this year.

And what good is all this to Black people?

—Octavia Butler, Positive Obsession

Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.

—Imani Perry

The route that led to this project began with my discovery of the 1988 Popular Library edition of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed. I came across the novel in 1991 while perusing the science fiction section of a chain bookstore.¹ The cover mesmerized me: it is an image of a woman in profile, positioned in front of a cracked cement-gray wall. Her head, from ear to crown, is a composite of a zebra, a cheetah, a gray crowned crane, some kind of butterfly or moth, and some variety of reptile; the collage forms a striking headdress.² It has been almost thirty years since this cover enticed me, so dramatically that I bought the novel knowing nothing about its content or author. Wild Seed’s cover image continues to amaze me, but I am now equally enthralled by its story, by Anyanwu (the female protagonist), and by Octavia Butler and her oeuvre.³ But when I look back on my initial response to the Popular Library cover, I confess that I was drawn to it because it featured a black woman.⁴ Since Anyanwu is from the western part of the African continent, Wayne Barlowe’s artistic choice is only extraordinary because sci-fi publishers typically avoided cover images that featured identifiably black, brown, or yellow people as subjects, the presumption being that depictions of these sorts would alienate the genre’s archetypal young, white, male reader.⁵ Since this practice was de rigueur (though unevenly applied), Popular Library’s decision to use Barlowe’s painting intrigues and generates a series of questions: If science fiction (and genre fictions generally)⁶ served a typical reader’s escapist desire, what might he be escaping to—and from—by reading Wild Seed? If such a reader picked up and read this novel after seeing its cover, how did he perceive its pan-African settings and depictions of Africans captured in transatlantic slavery? What might a white and male reader imagine when encountering Anyanwu—three hundred years old, shape-shifter, healer—living in the seventeenth-century American colony as slavery evolved into an institution, specifically in light of said institution’s self-serving definitions of African, slave, black, and woman? And yet, I do not identify as young, white, or male, so these questions reflect my concerns more than those of sci-fi’s presumptive reader. I must, then, reframe these interrogations: What might an unexpected reader of science fiction, specifically a (then young, now middle-aged) black woman reader of Wild Seed, imagine about a science fiction novel that features a long-lived, shape-shifting western African woman? Even more profoundly, what might Anyanwu, visualized on the cover and narrativized in a science fiction novel, mean to a (then young, now middle-aged) black woman living in and outside of Wild Seed’s pages?

These questions are significant in light of concerns of form and audience that often occupy discussions of genre fictions, as well as the extraliterary contexts in which discourses of race and gender exist and intersect. Consider that early sci-fi and detective fictions were said to allay anticipated readers’ apprehensions about changing political and social climates.⁷ Authors typically managed these anxieties by characterizing the defeat of quasi-human others or otherworldly aliens as necessary to maintain the status quo. Romance writers followed a predictable formula (love desired, love found, love tested, love affirmed, love in the happily ever after) to meet the expectations of middle-class white women readers. These popular premises afforded typical readers opportunities to escape from their realities, the result commonly used to distinguish category fictions from so-called literary fictions.⁸ Uncomplicated prose, predictable formulas, and familiar plots are said to facilitate this escapism, a release that lasts at least as long as it takes to consume a novel or story. Since popular fictions capably do this social work, the fact of a shape-shifting black woman on the cover and as the subject of a 1988 sci-fi novel is awesome, if not radical. Barlowe’s cover challenges the marketing reasons that determine what an attractive sci-fi cover should be; additionally, Wild Seed forced the publishing powers-that-be (powers-that-were?) to acknowledge audiences that previously they were not prepared to see.⁹ Given these givens, and in light of this project’s motivation, I want to map the significance of my encounter with Wild Seed’s cover carefully.

While category fictions are commonly understood as vehicles that drive typical readers’ escapist fantasies, Wild Seed offers me (U.S.-based, immigrant, black woman with dark-brown skin and 4b hair) little that can be considered escapist. It features historical and paranormal depictions of slavery, examples of spectacular patriarchal oppressions, and normalized gender and social hierarchies that subjugate black women. To put it plainly, the novel’s settings and relationships mirror those I know and most that I experience regularly. My embrace of this work of popular fiction, then, demonstrates that there’s more than escapism going on here. Time magazine’s book critic Lev Grossman writes,

Why do we seek out these hard places for our fantasy vacations? Because on some level, we recognize and claim those disasters as our own. We seek out hard places precisely because our lives are hard. When you read genre fiction, you leave behind the problems of reality—but only to re-encounter those problems in transfigured form, in an unfamiliar guise, one that helps you understand them more completely, and feel them more deeply. Genre fiction isn’t just generic pap. You don’t read it to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them.¹⁰

Grossman takes simplistic notions of escape off the table and gives me the language to articulate why I read and reread Wild Seed. Anyanwu’s fictional reality is familiar in that she is locked into and dominated by various systems of power (patriarchy, gender, global power, anti-Africanness). Even when her struggles are less familiar (coerced migration; alienation from people, history, culture; immortality; shape-shifting), I can still imagine how they affect the protagonist’s ability to be herself. Yet despite the novel’s fictionalizations of familiar extraliterary oppressions, the imaginable possibility of Anyanwu—specifically her ability to transform and heal and to be herself—remains fascinating. Before meeting Doro (whose name means east), Anyanwu (whose name means sun) does not understand herself as black or African or subservient to men but as an elder, a healer, and a descendant of Onitsha people subject to the Benin Empire. After Doro, she exists within limitations and subordinations demanded by him as well as those orchestrated by European notions of gender and civilization and the transatlantic slave trade. Yet, in these evolving contexts, Wild Seed’s female protagonist makes and can make herself into all manner of beings: female and male, human and animal, and species that exclusively exist in the novel’s reality.¹¹ Nevertheless, she is not flawless.

Although Octavia Butler’s imagination and genre-of-choice allow Anyanwu myriad bodily configurations, the female hero does not countenance every body. She willingly remakes her female body for the pleasure of male lovers, yet the suggestion that she similarly adjust her male’s body to pleasure a woman disgusts her. After she tells Doro that he has benefited from her ability to modify her vagina, the immortal responds, " ‘Someday,’ he murmured, vaguely preoccupied, ‘we will both change. I will become a woman and find out whether you make an especially talented man.’ ‘No!’ She jerked away from him.… ‘We will not do such a thing!’ … ‘It would be a vile thing.’ she whispered. ‘Surely an abomination.’ "¹² She is physically able to perform gender and sexuality fluidly, but Anyanwu’s initial response indicates that unfamiliar bodily contortions can only be abominable.¹³ Though her adherence to Onitsha history and culture limits the imaginable possibilities of what she can physically perform, Anyanwu can still refuse narratives that others script for her. Despite multiple dominating forces (Doro, European people and cultures, the slave trade), the protagonist’s ability to re/make herself—for herself—imagines a black femaleness that Butler’s popular form-of-choice assists. Navigating terrains that she did not make, Wild Seed’s female hero knows herself in ways that protect her from alien landscapes and foreign social-scapes, and fantastically so.

Doro, drawn to Anyanwu because he perceives her specialness, coerces her into joining him by presenting the prospect of progeny who might live at least as long as she has lived. Traveling by foot until they arrive at the West African coast, they join a coterie of Doro’s special people and travel through their own Middle Passage to the American colony. Anyanwu, Doro, and clan ultimately arrive in the village of Wheatley, where the antagonist’s people (Anyanwu’s shipmates as well as people Doro transports from across the globe) prepare a welcome feast. Overeating and unfamiliar food cause Anyanwu stomach pain, but because she is both shape-shifter and healer, she controls the impulse to vomit. At the end of the festivities, she retires to Doro’s bedroom and turns her consciousness (inner awareness) inward to identify exactly what has made her sick. Only then can Anyanwu [soothe] the sickness from her body.¹⁴ Doro, still learning the extent of the protagonist’s gifts, observes her as Anyanwu observes herself. After,

He reached under the blanket, rubbed her stomach gently. Her body was almost buried in the too-soft feather mattress. Have you healed yourself?

Yes. But with so much food, it took me a long time to learn what was making me sick.

Do you have to know?

Of course. How can I know what to do for healing until I know what healing is needed and why? I think I knew all the diseases and poisons of my people. I must learn the ones here.¹⁵

Anyanwu lives three hundred years without Doro, but through him, she is exposed to previously unknown tyrannies put in motion by his determination to build an immortal legacy. His goal knows no limits other than those imposed by the antagonist himself. And yet, Anyanwu knows bodies so intimately that she can become any body. Her bodily transformations manifest so thoroughly because of her intimate knowledge of her own body; nevertheless, these different states of intimacy do not prevent her from being the self that Octavia Butler writes so deliberately: black and woman. The protagonist moves through myriad individual and organized contexts that impose identities on her; still her intimate self-knowledge determines each cellular alteration that makes her into an/other. In other words, Anyanwu is always Anyanwu. She is never self and iterations of various bodies (both/and); she is and/and—or, more precisely, she is. Doro coerces/forces her participation in his plan to breed superhumans; nevertheless, the protagonist’s known self resists his definition and uses of her as well as the new territories to which he introduces her. As a black woman living in the United States, affected by stereotypes intended to denigrate me, I intentionally assess Anyanwu’s ability to be and to be self-aware. The inner awareness of Wild Seed’s protagonist disrupts narratives that subjugate, exhibiting a fictional subject who refuses to be reduced by oppressive gender and racial mores.

By depicting the conviction that Anyanwu exists in and in excess of boundaries fashioned by Doro, slavery, Europeanness/whiteness, and maleness, Butler fictionalizes what has assuredly been part of a diasporic African zeitgeist since the inception of the transatlantic slave trade. This may appear to be a huge claim, but it is one affirmed by Imani Perry’s creative nonfiction (2020): So many people taught us to be more than the hatred heaped upon us, to cultivate a deep self-regard no matter what others may think, say, or do. Many of us have absorbed that lesson and revel in it.¹⁶ It is also affirmed by Elizabeth Alexander’s creative nonfiction (2020): "Black creativity emerges from long lines of innovative responses to the death and violence that plague our communities. ‘Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,’ Toni Morrison wrote in Beloved, and I am interested in creative emergences from that ineluctable fact.¹⁷ And lastly, it is affirmed by Lucille Clifton’s 1993 poem: born in babylon / both nonwhite and woman / what did i see to be except myself?"¹⁸ Each of these women (1) articulates historical truths that violate and (seek to) proscribe who black people are and can be, and (2) lays bare truths that disrupt and upend these same racial/gender/class proscriptions. Or, most provocatively, though 1 and 2 occur simultaneously, Butler, Clifton, Perry, and Alexander speak truths about blackness and black femaleness—ones that know black experience beyond the limits of racist biases and misogynoir¹⁹—truths that pragmatically refuse parochial discourses of race and gender. Importantly, the expression that Alexander, Perry, Butler, and Clifton share manifests the vital congress between content and their respective genres (creative nonfiction, science fiction, poetry), vital because the intimate connection between what these writers say and how they say it expresses a complex black subjectivity that lives—can live—in ways that this subjectivity was not intended to exist.

The preceding pages capture the enormous impact of Octavia Butler’s sci-fi imagining and Wayne Barlowe’s visual rendering of Anyanwu and establish Evidence of Things Not Seen’s point of departure. The combination of Barlowe’s doubly visual form (painting and book cover) and the inherent hyperbole of Butler’s form-of-choice is an exaggerated expression of a fundamental premise: Anyanwu perceives her black womanness in her own way and as irreducible to the overlapping oppressions that she subsequently encounters. A powerful consequence of Butler’s fantastical illustration of the female hero, in and through various repressive contexts, is the idea that infinite iterations of black femaleness are possible because they are imaginable. The author’s scribal imaginings, as well as Barlowe’s vision for his painting, exist. As reader, I enlarge their foundations: the Anyanwu I imagine lives beyond the novel’s pages because she helps me to deeply imagine ways to come to terms with the problems she faces, that we—Anyanwu and I—face.²⁰ The Anyanwu I see and imagine makes it possible for me to ask, How can I re/see my black and woman self? Navigating oppressive terrains that I did not make, can my re/seeing be a tool that upends these terrains and my relationships to them? Wild Seed, specifically its protagonist’s self-awareness, responds to these questions.

This form/content analysis of Wild Seed’s 1988 cover and protagonist evolved into my conception of fantastical blackness. I theorize this phrase in the introduction, but here it begins with my vision of Anyanwu. As it appears in the hyperbolic reaches of science fiction, fantastical blackness is visible in the protagonist’s expressed belief that her black self cannot be wholly defined by the desires of anyone other than herself, an inexorable truth augmented by her imagined self (long-lived, shape-shifting Onitsha woman) and available to readers outside of Wild Seed’s pages. Anyanwu’s imagined (conceived and written by Butler, visualized by Barlowe) and imaginable (interpreted by me) selves, not to mention selves that I cannot currently imagine (likely even if not wholly conceivable now), illustrate a fantastical blackness that critically articulates possibilities for black subjectivity in contexts in which black and human were never expected to be.

Evidence of fantastical blackness in other types of popular fiction further supports this Anyanwu-machinated conceptualization.

Evidence of Things Not Seen

Introduction

They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

A black child picks up a copy of Spider Man and imagines himself swinging into a world beyond the limitations imposed by Harlem or Congress.

—Walter Mosley, Black to Future

Being Black and Fantastical

Several certainties motivate Evidence of Things Not Seen: Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions: first, that popular creative forms—specifically popular literary forms—are unique vehicles in which complex representations of blackness exist and through which they are purposefully articulated; second, that the hyperbolic features of popular fictions make them inexorable tools for theorizing fantastical blackness. This project acknowledges that antiblackness and the condition of social death are made—and made necessary—to support supremacist notions and privileges of whiteness.¹ And yet, in Evidence of Things Not Seen, I am interested in what happens when analyses of blackness in popular fictions center us, specifically the us who could make a people when we were reduced to a race.

These certainties derive from the concept of fantastical blackness. The term and its variants (blackness’s fantastical truths, blackness’s imaginable truths) are evidence of things not seen: truths about blackness that are real and accessible though they resist quantification. That which defines blackness as fantastical is the deep self regard that lives despite what others think or say or do (Imani Perry, Racism Is Terrible. Blackness Is Not); the emergent, innovative responses to the death and violence that haunt black communities (Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation); the intentional making of self when there is no model (Lucille Clifton, won’t you celebrate with me); the movement in and out of the frame … or whatever externally imposed social logic (Fred Moten, The Case of Blackness).² This perception of a black self is fantastical—conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination (Dictionary.com)—because it lives, despite every attempt at annihilation.³ And this blackness is amazing because fantastical blackness is irreducible to antiblackness. Fantastical blackness captures a quintessence emboldened by the evidence of black people refusing and upending antiblack narratives, by the knowledge of the truth that blackness cannot be reduced by racist/oppressive imaginings. And finally, as I put it to work in this project, fantastical blackness is an ethical interpretive practice: it does not teach blackness to those who lack knowledge but positions this black self-knowledge as an interpretive point of departure rather than as a reaction to dominant narratives that threaten and diminish us.

As Alexander, Perry, and Moten theorize it, fantastical blackness acts in extraliterary spaces by unsettling the authority of antiblack narratives; Clifton imagines it doing the same when she depicts it poetically. That this concept is visible in fiction and nonfiction, and that each written form contributes to breaking limits on black possibilities in extraliterary spaces, indicates that it is a critical tool that offers insight into diasporic black self-knowledge while rejecting narrow parameters for blackness. The unrestrained imaginings that characterize mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy, and mixed-genre popular fictions speak to the strange and wonderful aspect of the fantastical in fantastical blackness (Cambridge Dictionary); thus, category fictions’ hyperbolic registers communicate the profundity of this quality of blackness. And when black pop-fiction writers center this expressive quintessence, they make it available to a broad and knowledgeable audience that can use its imaginable vocabularies outside of fiction (remember, Lev Grossman says, you don’t read [genre fiction] to escape your problems, you read it to find a new way to come to terms with them).⁴ I do not, however, advance fantastical blackness as merely celebratory or resilient.

Because literary forms are significant critical tools through which we assess worlds outside of fiction, we need their unique insights now more than ever. Racial discourse in the current global climate—a current that I locate in 2012 after the murder of Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi’s call to action—is stricken by a crisis of imagination. Whiteness only appears able to imagine itself and its greatness through exclusionary violence, and blackness is constrained by its perception in the white imagination.⁵ The rise in antiblack (among other) hate crimes, unsurprisingly accompanied by a rise in visibility of white-supremacist groups, demonstrates the lengths some white people are willing to go to reinforce narratives of white superiority and privilege. As bell hooks observes, there is a direct and abiding connection between the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy in this society and the institutionalization via mass media of specific images, representations of race, of blackness that support and maintain the oppression, exploitation, and overall domination of black people.⁶ Where hooks’s primary focus is the United States, Christina Sharpe makes a similar observation about locations across the globe: "In much of what passes for public discourse about terror we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments; the ground of terror’s possibility globally.⁷ Through institutionalized scribal and visual forms across the globe, racist stereotypes are used to terrorize blackness and reinforce and reinscribe" a mythic whiteness.⁸

To respond to this crisis of imagination, what I propose are ways to envision and assert a differently imagined blackness. Consider, for example, how Claudia Rankine and Lynn Nottage articulate this crisis. Rankine writes, because white men can’t / police their imagination / black people are dying.⁹ Nottage, responding to questions about her play Sweat and its muses (working-class residents of Reading, Pennsylvania), says, we are a country that has lost our narrative.¹⁰ Both creative writers capture the significance of imagination and the stories we tell about ourselves. Rankine’s tercet exposes the role that imagination plays in determining white men’s behavior; the enormity of her poetic revelation is excruciatingly revealed when the murder and abuse of black people are considered reasonable because they are imagined as such. These three lines speak the power of imagination, in this case, the power to kill black people imagined as terror’s embodiment.

Lynn Nottage responds in her interview to what she perceived as a sense of wretchedness among Reading’s working-class people: "One of the first questions we asked was, how do you describe your city? People would respond by saying: ‘Reading was …’ They were incredibly nostalgic for this glorious imagined past. It nearly broke my heart. I thought this is a city that cannot conceive of itself in the present or future tense. It is a microcosm of what is happening in America today. We are a country that has lost our narrative. We can’t project our future because we don’t know where we are going."¹¹ Researching how economic stagnation was shifting the American narrative and how so many people who had so thoroughly invested in the American dream found themselves broadsided, Nottage saw a certain level of rage, particularly among the white working class, which … would express itself in some malignant way: When I was having conversations with people, a lot of the subtext, unspoken, was the white majority’s discomfort with diversity and inclusion.¹² Working-class whites focused not on the social, political, and economic institutions designed to privilege the elite but on people who prevented working-class white people from claiming favors they considered their due. Nottage’s muses held onto failed narratives of white supremacy, a consequence of which was an inability to form new narratives.

Though taking on different aspects of this crisis of imagination, both Rankine (poetically posing the result of a limited imagination) and Nottage (dramatically portraying the United States’ flawed imagining) describe the same consequence: targeted black people. The poet and the playwright reference a durable, mythic whiteness and a refusal to relinquish privileges that attach to it as narratives that produce an imagined, denigrated blackness. And while they describe imaginings that lead to violence, both suggest the need for new ways to imagine different presents and futures. I am, however, only indirectly concerned with how and why whiteness imagines itself. Instead, this project explores how—in different and multiple contexts of antiblackness—blackness can re/imagine blackness and what tools blackness uses to do so. Or rather than argue for new ways, I want to recollect the ways that blackness imagines itself (So many people taught us to be more than the hatred heaped upon us, to cultivate a deep self-regard no matter what others may think, say, or do).¹³ Evidence of Things Not Seen, to state it succinctly, explores how—when amplified by pop fictions’ hyperbolic imaginings—fantastical blackness privileges self and breaches the limits of antiblackness.

Nottage and Rankine document imagination’s material impact: to maintain destructive social mores, to kill. Since poem and play persuade, imagination can also reveal, consider, re/make, and re/imagine other materialities.¹⁴ Sylvia Wynter describes the kind of transformative imagining I mean, in her thinking about different Jamaican histories:

So the decision to borrow the name of Jamaica Journal from an earlier planter class journal was deliberate on my part. The idea was that you’re going to keep a continuity with the past, but you are going at the same time to transform the conception of that past.… I wanted us to assume our past: slaves, slave masters, and all. And then, reconceptualize that past.… You see, because we have taken from the West their conception of freedom and slavery, we tend to conceptualize freedom and slavery only in their terms. Yet when we look at African conceptions of slavery, it’s entirely different.… What I’m trying to say is that we have looked back on our slave past with a shudder, and so we’ve not been able to see it.¹⁵

This quotation literally explains Wynter’s decision to use the name of a planter class journal for one committed to the exploration of a contemporary, black Jamaica. Read theoretically, however, Wynter advances the argument that an exclusively Western lens cannot constructively see Jamaica, can only see Jamaica’s encounter with the West and see it as dread. And she continues, positing that through African conceptions of slavery, this same history must look different. Wynter envisions something that only becomes possible when we accept that multiple lenses exist and see in myriad ways. I use this perspective specifically to support the claim that, shaped by unrestrained imaginings available in genre fictions, fantastical blackness makes up, then makes real.¹⁶

The power of blackness and black womanness expressed above and in the prologue (Butler’s, Rankine’s, Nottage’s, Perry’s, Alexander’s, Clifton’s, Moten’s, Wynter’s) resides not only in the common thread that connects each rendition but also in the forms that convey these shared expressions. I thus turn my critical eye toward the likelihood that a similarly imagined quality of blackness can be expressed in myriad popular genres. Features and techniques that differentiate science fiction, creative nonfiction, multimedia/lyric poetry, theater, and criticism permeate each writer’s view of blackness, putting formalist emphases in conversation with content. With regard to popular fictions, their extravagance defamiliarizes the familiar, a relationship that encourages readers to ask different questions—and to move toward various, imaginable resolutions. Formalist analyses of race in genre fictions encourage questions about how we know what we know, and how we communicate what we know, about black selves. Fantasy, romance, multigenre, and science fictions are literary forms in which the uncanny, the inexplicable, the idealized, and the imagined unimaginable are fundamental, features that—when intricately linked to content—create feedback loops that persistently magnify portrayals of black experience. The exaggerated—the hyperbolic—in category fictions reflects and projects the fantastical of blackness.¹⁷ By magnifying this subject, category fictions make way for focused readerly attention to and strong impressions of fantastical blackness. Attributes that define specific popular fictions are larger than life, and as such, they are intentional, embellished expressions that push beyond the limits of the currently known. These mental flights of fancy lend themselves to examinations of blackness, distinguishing representations that are shaped by myriad diasporic African locations. Fittingly, an intimate union of literary form and black content characterizes fantastical blackness. When popular literature centers this concept, readers can focus on imaginable possibilities of seeing blackness as self-perceived blackness as well as in/in excess of extraliterary realities.¹⁸ And strong impressions last and live outside of pages of fiction.

Evidence of Things Not Seen reads, as a category of analysis, fantastical blackness in twentieth- and twenty-first-century erotic/urban romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and multigenre popular fictions written by black writers from the Anglophone Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. These important literary works, some rarely analyzed, refine and enact my critical vision: Tobias Buckell’s Spurn Babylon (fantasy story), Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain (erotic romance novel), Nalo Hopkinson’s A Habit of Waste (fantasy story) and Brown Girl in the Ring (sci-fi/fantasy novel), BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam (mystery novel), and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (thriller/suspense/fantasy/mystery/historical novel). Because often obscured by a realist frame of reference,¹⁹ fantastical registers magnify black experiences to make them more intentionally, centrally, profoundly, and variously visible. The impact of this kind of representation, at this crucial moment, unlocks imaginable possibilities that resist limits of myriad antiblack narratives.

My primary texts are distinctive in that each supports a sustained form/content critique, a literary critical approach to theorizing blackness that permits the interrogation—and visibility—of the un/imaginable.²⁰ Each chapter highlights a popular genre in which blackness is uniquely performed, a critical orientation that asks a range of questions. Evidence of Things Not Seen generally inquires, What can be learned from depictions of inter- and extraterrestrial migrations; or supernatural peoples, species, and locations; or idealized love and lovers; or transubstantiated belief systems of African, North American, and Caribbean peoples? More specifically, it asks, What mysterious crimes are revealed by an amateur sleuth who chooses to be black (BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam)? What is revealed when a fantastically black lens turns to the United States’ foundational narrative (Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad)? What practical lessons are available in a fantasy story about a curvaceous black, Canadian woman who downloads her consciousness into the boyish body of a white woman (Hopkinson’s A Habit of Waste)? Might thinking about multiculturalism in Canada shift radically if informed by a Trinidadian-Canadian character who channels Yoruba-derived gods through Toronto’s CN Tower (Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring)? What kinds of black love can be made if the protagonist of an erotic romance is the role model (Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain)? How much and what kinds