Imagining a Better World: Black Futurity in Contemporary Afrofuturism and Speculative FictionTools Dyer-Johnson, Omara Samirah (2022) Imagining a Better World: Black Futurity in Contemporary Afrofuturism and Speculative Fiction. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractOriginally coined in the 1990s, the term Afrofuturism has become a prominent part of popular culture and has helped to address the absence of Black people and cultures from speculations about the future. Many texts have been labelled as examples of Afrofuturism by critics, scholars and fans, though identifying the key aspects of the genre is challenging. This thesis argues that integral to the genre is the question: what is a ‘better’ world? I contend that an integral part of Afrofuturism is the author’s desire to imagine a ‘better’ world and that each author presents an alternative consideration of what a ‘better’ world is or should be. This project focuses on contemporary expressions of Afrofuturism as existing scholarship has been primarily concerned with defining the genre, historicising it, and constructing an Afrofuturist canon. However, contemporary texts conceive of ‘better’ worlds in ways that differ from the established Afrofuturist canon.
Actions (Archive Staff Only)
|
Tools
Tools
