Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-220) and index.
Contents:
Prologue : Revelations in Black ... and Popular -- 1. First : Mystery : Fantastically Black Blanche White : Barbara Neely'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".
Summary:
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.