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  • Imagining Possible Futures:Afrofuturism and Social Critique in Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper
  • Megan Jeanette Myers (bio)

Daniel José Older's New York Times bestseller Shadowshaper (2015) centers on teenager Sierra Santiago's entrance into the shadowshaping community and her confrontation of the dangers that the Afro-syncretic tradition faces.1 Exploring an ancestral tradition or "spiritual magic"2 that is passed down from one generation to the next, Older's pairing of a young Afro-Latina protagonist alongside Afrofuturist themes serves as a catalyst for the social critiques inherent in the novel. More than offering its readers an entrance into the elusive world of shadowshaping, Shadowshaper also delves into the challenges that multicultural adolescents face in the modern world. While the protagonist's inner battles—from themes of body image to self-identifying as a multicultural teen—emerge as constants in the young adult (YA) novel, societal and communal issues, including gentrification and policy brutality, also represent major preoccupations in the text.3 The practice of shadowshaping—an Afro-Caribbean spiritual art form that connects "shadowshapers" to spirits through artistic expression that builds on multiple cosmologies including Santería and Candomblé—succeeds in reallocating power and advocacy to the Afro-Latinx Brooklyn community in the face of gentrification.4 The present essay explores how the representation of Afrofuturism and other alternative futurisms in Shadowshaper supports the presence of complex social critiques in the novel, ranging from gentrification and police brutality to body image and the colonization of knowledge. Connecting the novel's social commentary and Afrofuturist pulse situates the text as a unique Latinx coming-of-age narrative that overtly addresses the "struggle for visibility in youth literature" (Jiménez García, "Lens" 5) by writing in (instead of writing out) complex themes related to race, place, and identity development.

Shadowshaper's Afro-Latina protagonist, Sierra Santiago, reclaims the past in an effort to envision an alternative future and in doing so emphasizes a fusion between the primitive and the modern in the novel, a distinguishing feature of Afrofuturism. Shadowshaper illuminates an excavation of the past as a means to harness more desirable and inclusive futures by establishing ancestral connections and family history [End Page 105] as key to saving and reviving the shadowshaping community. Older's utilization of Afrofuturist conventions as a means to address societal issues facing the diverse, urban Brooklyn community of Bed-Stuy in Shadowshaper renders a more complex and multiculturally minded model of young adult literature and offers readers an example of a coming-of-age novel for a racially diverse readership. In particular, Latina YA literature reveals "Latina teenage girl protagonists growing up within twenty-first-century US culture" and features Latina protagonists "working through questions of identity and belonging through the lens of both ethnicity and class, which is often absent in popular commercial YA fiction featuring white protagonists" (Salinas-Moniz 87). Older inserts an Afro-Latina protagonist, Sierra, into contemporary US culture, while also overtly linking her path to identity formation to her past and thus directing the novel toward a YA readership eager to imagine an alternative—postcolonial, racially inclusive, socially just, and Afro-Latinx—future. The interest of the novel in envisioning a YA Latinx future serves to expand an understanding of the novel as Afrofuturist to one that is also representative of Latin@futurism and thus underscores the nascent but growing field of Latin@futurism that Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson notes focuses on the "specific and unique histories and ontologies informing Latin@ speculative aesthetics." Shadowshaper, then, also relies on Latin@futurist principles to situate Sierra, the shadowshaping community, and the diverse community in which the novel is set within an alternative futurist framework that prioritizes heterogeneity and hybridity.

The practice of shadowshaping and the channeling of spirits into art forms—most clearly defined in the novel as "work[ing] with spirits. … some of 'em are the ancestors of us shadowshapers, some are just other folks that passed on and then became spirits. But they're like our protectors, our friends even" (Older, Shadowshaper 62–63)—at its most basic level looks backward, not forward; and the tradition unites the Afro-Puerto Rican Sierra with past generations of her...

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