In his widely-referenced 1994 essay, Black to the Future, cultural critic Mark Dery ponders why “so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other—the stranger in a strange land—would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists[.]”
Broadly speaking, science fiction as a genre is often characterized by imagined future scientific or technological worlds, and are often dystopian in nature. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the earliest examples of sci-fi fiction. George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred are famous sci-fi works from the 20th century. With the exciting, chaotic post-industrial advancements of the mid to late twentieth century in the United States— its ascension to global military power, the military-industrial complex, the 1969 Apollo space mission, then the birth and rise of personal computers, information networks and the internet— the American “reality” became much like science fiction itself. Certainly by 1994, the African-American writer would have occupied a very different, sci-fi inflected imaginative space than say, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, or James Baldwin?
Never mind that; it gets better. A new generation of genre-bending writers, which includes Mateo Askaripour, author of the novel Black Buck (2020), is re-defining twentieth century notions of what it means to explore science and technology in fictional spaces where “Africa meets the West.” And many of them are rejecting the rigid templates of Afrofuturism.
The new approach to Black science fiction is less explicitly scientific or technological, more explicitly speculative, and clearly psychologically-driven. Horror, science, technology and traditional literary themes are mashed up in varying proportions as one. Like the male protagonist of Jordan Peele’s critically-acclaimed film Get Out (2017), Darren, the main character of Askaripour’s Black Buck navigates a fictional world that’s largely White—at least beyond his home. In this world, the boundaries between what’s “real” and “imagined” are blurred in a never-ending series of unsettling paradoxes often centered on this concern: is this uncomfortable event I’m experiencing a racial attack, or am I being too sensitive? It’s often clear that however the protagonist decides to respond to this question, he better get it just right. An under-reaction to a race-based attack might imperil his dignity or even his life. An over-reaction, such as we see during Darren’s “interview” at a start-up, when he wonders whether he’s on the verge of becoming the victim of a physical attack, might imperil his career and his life.
In a technical work environment where Darren is both a racial novelty, a source of exotic fascination and an implied threat to an established social and racial order, he must constantly check his emotions against events that are antagonistic, neutral and outrightly welcoming in the nature. And he must succeed in gauging the threat level attendant to each one.
The list of Black writers in twenty-first century America who are exploring this sci-fi-tinged form of speculative, realistic fiction is thriving: Colson Whitehead, with The Intuitionist (1999), is possibly one of the earliest contributors to this space. The contributions of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenvah and Lesley Nneka Arimah are vibrantly shaped by these authors’ experiences as first and second-generation immigrants. Mateo Askaripour himself, while born in New York City, is the son of an Iranian father and Jamaican mother.
With its novel plot structure, staged as a fictional sales pitch to “help other Black men and women on a mission to sell their visions all the way to the top,” Askaripour’s Black Buck, along with the work of many of his peers, pushes in a very interesting way against the perceived limits of Black science fiction as Dery defined it in the twentieth century.
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