The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination

Maxine Lavon Montgomery

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350248557
• eBook ISBN: 9781350124523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Exploring postapocalypticism in the Black literary and cultural tradition, this book extends the scholarly conversation on Afro-futurist canon formation through an examination of futuristic imaginaries in representative twentieth and twenty-first century works of literature and expressive culture by Black women in an African diasporic setting. The author demonstrates the implications of Afro-futurist literary criticism for Black Atlantic literary and critical theory, investigating issues of hybridity, transcending boundaries, temporality and historical recuperation. Covering writers including Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward and Beyoncé, this book examines the ways Black women artists attempt to recover a raced and gendered heritage, and how they explore an evolving social order that is both connected to and distinct from the past.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Beyond the End of History: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and a Postapocalyptic Imaginary
• 2 Coming of Age on the Dark Side: Speculative Fictions of Black Girlhood in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light
• 3 “Queering” the New World Order in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven
• 4 Un-zombifying Blackness in Erna Brodber’s Myal and Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café
• 5 Romance after the Ruin: Looking for Love in the Era of the “Post” in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, and Beyonce’s Lemonade
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint