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CLA JOURNAL 25 “Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell Trent Masiki The Field Negro’s Lament In his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X tells a parable about the house Negro and the field Negro, two male slaves who hold opposing views on the merits of escaping their life in racial bondage. Paralyzed by the creature comforts of his relative privilege, the house Negro is satisfied with the status quo. When approached with the idea of running away, the house Negro balks, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” Fearing neither uncertainty nor the unknown, the field Negro replies, “Any place is better than here” (Malcolm X 11).The field Negro’s lament epitomizes how African Americans have, from the nineteenth century to the present, theorized and practiced emigration as a response to US racism and racial terror. Because they demonstrated the capacity to imagine and effect a liberated future for themselves, fugitive-minded slaves like the allegorical field Negro were, loosely speaking, afrofuturists. In his 1993 article “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” Mark Dery coined the term afrofuturism,1 defining it as an aesthetic mode of expression that focuses on African Americans and their relationship to advanced science and technology in the near or distant future (Dery 180). Since the 1990s, afrofuturism gained a host of proponents in literary and cultural studies because it advances the idea that African American speculative culture should promote African American social, political, and cultural agency. Scholars and writers like Alondra Nelson, Sheree R. Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Reynaldo Anderson, Kodwo Eshun, and Jeffery Allen Tucker were key in promoting the critical study of speculative literature by writers of African descent and defining afrofuturism as a Pan-African aesthetic rather than an exclusively African American one.2 Although afrofuturism is ethnocentric in its content, it is racially ecumenical in its authorship. Just as anyone can sing the blues, play 1  “Black to the Future” was first published in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 4, 1993. For a twenty-five year scholarly retrospective on afrofuturism, see Barber et al. 2  Each of these scholars and writers has written seminal texts about afrofuturism and African American science fiction, see Nelson; Thomas; Hopkinson and Nelson; Anderson and Jones; Anderson; Eshun; Tucker. 26 CLA JOURNAL Trent Masiki jazz, or perform hip hop dance, Dery suggests that anyone, regardless of race, can produce an afrofuturist text.3 Afrofuturism’s ethnoracial pluralism is essential to its efficacy as an antiracist cultural technology, argues literary scholar DeWitt D. Kilgore. Afrofuturism, contends Kilgore, “can be viewed as less a marker of black authenticity and more of a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unconscious assumptions about which histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we might imagine” (“Afrofuturism” 564). On one hand, afrofuturism’s racial pluralism poses the threat that speculative literature and media about people of African descent will be produced by people who have no existential investment in the history and condition of being a person of African descent. On the other hand, afrofuturism’s pluralism encourages all people, regardless of their race, to consume speculative literature, film, music, and art that centers and/or features people of African descent.4 The rich tension between afrofuturism’s ethnocentrism and its racial pluralism invites one to analyze understudied racial themes in Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) and Derrick A. Bell’s “The Space Traders” (1992). Since 2003, scholars in African American literary studies have been reinvestigating “Way in the Middle of the Air” and “The Space Traders” because these stories directly address science fiction’s evasion of the history of slavery, segregation, and racial terror in the US. In his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, André M. Carrington notes that Bradbury is a significant science fiction writer because he explicitly engages racial...

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