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2018 Darker Matters: Racial Theorizing through Alternate History, Transhistorical Black Bodies, and Towards a Literature of Black Mecha in the Science Fiction Novels of Steven Barnes Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

DARKER MATTERS:

RACIAL THEORIZING THROUGH ALTERNATE HISTORY, TRANSHISTORICAL

BLACK BODIES, AND TOWARDS A LITERATURE OF BLACK MECHA IN THE

SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS OF STEVEN BARNES

ALEXANDER DUMAS J. BRICKLER IV

A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2018

Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV defended this dissertation on April 16, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Jerrilyn McGregory Professor Directing Dissertation

Delia Poey University Representative

Maxine Montgomery Committee Member

Candace Ward Committee Member

Dennis Moore Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foremost, I have to give thanks to the Most High. My odyssey through graduate school was indeed a long night of the soul, and without mustard-seed/mountain-moving faith, this journey would have been stymied a long time before now.

Profound thanks to my utterly phenomenal dissertation committee as well, and my chair,

Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, especially. From the moment I first perused the syllabus of her class on folkloric and speculative traditions of Black authors, I knew I was going to have a fantastic experience working with her. And I was right! It has been nothing short of phenomenal. Whether discussing Black literature, women in hip hop, or zombies, the academic and personal validation of my “Blerd” (Black nerd) tendencies that I got from her has made my time at Florida State immeasurably better.

And the other members of my committee are likewise deserving of thanks. Sincere appreciation to Drs. Maxine Montgomery, Dennis Moore, Candace Ward, for being such compelling influences on my academic and professional development. I have fond memories of classes with each of them, and their willingness to not simply teach, but to share opportunities for personal and professional development. It was in Dr. Moore’s American Literature reading group that I first had the opportunity to speak on Afrofuturism in an academic setting. Dr.

Ward’s Caribbean literature classes were instrumental in providing a deeper sense of what

Diaspora means. And Dr. Montgomery’s Toni Morrison seminar remains legendary in my mind.

Additional thanks to Dr. Delia Poey as the university representative on my committee. Her insights throughout the prelims process proved to be invaluable, and I sincerely appreciated her willingness to be a part of my doctoral journey.

iii Special thanks to the man himself, Steven Barnes, for taking time to speak with me directly on February 3, 2018. The fact that he was willing to carve an hour out of his remarkably busy schedule producing works of fiction and coordinating webinars on Afrofuturism with Tananarive

Due to share his wisdom about things both literary and health related was deeply appreciated.

Insofar as this project is dedicated to understanding and investigating depictions of Black masculinity, I would be remiss in not thanking the various Black men in my life who have served as mentors, role-models, and dispensers of various forms of paternal wisdom. Deepest and most sincere thanks to my Morehouse College cross-country/track and field coach, Willie Hill; to my mentor and major professor at Florida A&M University, Dr. David H. Jackson Jr.; to my father- in-law, Cecil Rolle; to my grandfathers, David Petty and, Dr. Alexander Brickler, II; my host of uncles; and most of all, to my father, Dr. A. J. Brickler, III. Each of these were vital in my education and instilling in me a strong sense of selfhood, social awareness, and desire towards that loftiest of ideals: to be a good and decent man.

Additional thanks must be directed toward Drs. Jocelyn Jackson, Augstine Konneh, Daniel

Klenbort, and my various other professors, classmates, and track and field teammates at

Morehouse College. The proverb that defines the experiences at the institution is that

“Morehouse holds a crown above her student’s head that she challenges them to grow tall enough to wear.” I hope that, by standing atop this tome of a dissertation at least, I will have finally met that intellectual, moral, and spiritual height requirement.

Thanks also to everyone in Minneapolis. A big thank you to the entire faculty in the

Department of Asian Languages and Literatures: Drs. Joe Allen, Maki Isaka, Simona Sawney,

Michael Molasky, and all the rest; likewise to my colleagues: Jesse, Mike, Devon, Farrah, Blair, and everyone else. Further thanks to the faculty in the African American Studies Department:

iv Drs. Keletso Atkins, Rose Brewer, Yuichiro Onishi, and everyone else. Further, further thanks to my friends, colleagues, and associates in the Black Graduate and Professional Student

Association (BGAPSA). Thanks to my dear friends in the University’s Office of Equity and

Diversity’s Community of Scholars Program. And very, very special thanks to Dr. Karla

Padron—friend, mentor, and scholar/activist par excellence—who knows better than anyone that

I absolutely would not have made it at the U for as long as I did without her!

Big thanks to everyone at FAMU. Everyone I had the pleasure to meet and work with there was as much a direct mentor as a teacher, and I grew tremendously as a scholar there. Thanks to basically the entire History Department: Drs. Darius Young, Reginald Ellis, Kyle Eidahl, Titus

Brown, Ameenah Shakir, and Will Guzman. Thanks to my friends and mentors in the English

Department as well: Drs. April McCray, Naima Ford, and Natalie King-Pedroso. And huge thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Dawson at the Meek-Eaton Southeastern Regional Black Archives, who has believed in me, since I was a high school volunteer there. Finally, a big thanks to Mrs.

Althemese Barnes and the various folks I met and worked with at the John G. Riley House and

Museum through my internship there as a student at FAMU.

Finally, assorted thanks to friends and family from all over the country (and the world, I suppose). My church family at Trinity United Presbyterian. My KCP International Japanese

Language School friends and colleagues. To the various family (and “family”) members who never stopped believing in me: Alana and Aidan, Christy, Jeff and Sarah, Mikayla, Sakinah,

Adam and Courtney (and little Cora!), Mimmo and Sarah, Jonathan and Taneika, and Jake,

Preston, and Maya. To my aunties and uncles. To Courtney, Melanie, Adam and the rest of my in-laws. To my grandparents (who both keep me humble and lift me up!).

v And special thanks to my Brothers and Sistahs at FSU, where having a critical mass of

Black graduate students was absolutely vital to this process. Kenny, Tyreek, Cocoa, Yolanda,

Kendra, Candace, and Janelle, none of this would have been possible without you all, and I love the bond that we have!

Penultimately, thank you so much to my Mama, Mildred, and to my brother David. I love you both, and your lifelong support has meant the world, and look! I just about made it!

Lastly, and most importantly, more thanks than is possible to convey in the written word to my wife, Jenifer. Doc, I love you, and thanks for helping me to realize this dream.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... viii

1. FOUNDATIONS OF STEVEN BARNES’S AFROFUTURIST SPACETIME SOMATIC ....1

2. TO FLIP THE SCRIPT: LION’S BLOOD , ALTERNATE HISTORY, AND NARRATIVES OF COUNTERMEMORY IN THE CREATION OF SACETIMES FOR BLACK AMERICAN BODIES ...... 33

3. ETERNAL DARKNESS: NARRATING THE TRANSHISTORICAL BLACK BODY IN BLOOD BROTHERS ...... 81

4. APOCALYPSE NOW: IRON SHADOWS AND AFROASIAN BODIES AS HISTORICAL TEXTS ...... 108

5. SOUL IN THE SHELL: THE AUBRY KNIGHT TRILOGY, BLACK MECHA, AND CYBERPUNK INVESTIGATIONS OF TECHNOLOGICAL BLACK BODIES AS SITES OF RECURSIVE HISTORICAL ENACTION ...... 134

6. PANAFRICA FOREVER: FIREDANCE, BLACK PANTHER, AND BLACK MECHA’S AFROASIAN AFROFUTURISM ...... 179

APPENDIX ...... 213

References ...... 223

Biographical Sketch ...... 231

vii ABSTRACT This dissertation seeks to investigate the novels of Black science fiction author, Steven Barnes, and analyse four of them for the purposes of interpreting the ways in which he frames Black ontology and history within various sorts of Black bodies. In reading several of Barnes’s novels—Lion’s Blood , Blood Brothers , the Aubry Knight trilogy ( Streetlethal , Gorgon Child , and Firedance ), and Iron Shadows —I position the author’s oeuvre as a functioning exploration of Afrofuturist themes of reflection/prolepsis as enacted through the subjectivity and somatic presences of his characters. Chapter one lays the foundation for this process by engaging with

Henderson’s theories surrounding the trope of “the Scar” as a marker of historicised bodily trauma, and highlighting the ways that Barnes’s work is especially suited for this kind of somatic narrative. Chapter two proposes that Lion’s Blood (2002) , a work of alternate history that supposes a counterfactual wherein African empires colonise North America and enslave

Europeans, Barnes is able to challenge prevailing popular methods of scripting what Black masculinity can be. Chapter three reads Blood Brothers (1996) as a narrative of transhistorical

Black bodies, and investigates the dynamic interplay between the slave-past and the then-present of the 1990s, by juxtaposing comparable expressions of institutional violence against Black bodies in each era. Chapter four builds upon the reading of bodies and history, but shifts the focus from Transatlantic to Transpacific links through the AfroAsian theming suggested by

Barnes’s 1998 novel Iron Shadows . Chapter five seeks to read Barnes’s Aubry Knight novels

(1983, 1989, 1993) in conversation with their contemporaneous SF movement, cyberpunk, and explores the ways that they inject complexity of Black masculinity and historical relevance into the movement’s take on “hard science fiction”. Chapter six serves as a coda and combines the

AfroAsian trajectory of Chapter Four and the investigations of cybernetic somatics in Chapter

Five to propose analysing the Black futures of Barnes’s 1993 novel, Firedance through the

viii thematic motif of “Black mecha” (which allegorises prosthetic re/connections through the tropes of Japanese mecha anime)

CHAPTER 1

FOUNDATIONS OF STEVEN BARNES’S AFROFUTURIST SPACETIME SOMATIC

I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

The Remarkable, Recursive, Robotic Mr. Riley

As part of the work being done in pursuit of my Masters of Applied Social Sciences degree at Florida A&M University in 2012, I was given the opportunity to intern as a docent at the John G. Riley House and Museum, a historical home of a former-slave-turned-educator and

“race man.” The internship was, for a Tallahassee native such as myself, a great way to become better acquainted with my hometown’s history, and to learn more about a local figure of Black prestige who helped define life in the city around the turn of the twentieth century.

But one of the most utterly fascinating things about the Riley House as an institution of local history—and this beyond the fact that Riley himself was member of both the NAACP and the National Negro Business League; beyond the fact that his assets at the time of his death in

1954 totaled to one cent under a million dollars; beyond the fact that he was a vaunted educator and principal who even local whites deferentially referred to as “Professor”—was the museum’s centerpiece interactive exhibit. The Riley House features an automated wax replica of its famous former owner, one that moves and speaks a series of pre-recorded sound-bites to welcome visitors to the museum.

The figure is one of a high standard of craftsmanship, to be sure. My boss told me as part of my docent training that it was commissioned by the same downstate Florida company that made the figures who populated the Hall of Presidents at Walt Disney World in Orlando. Yet, as remarkable as this robotic Riley replica is in terms of its verisimilitude to the man himself, there

is something about it that lodges it firmly within the so-called “uncanny valley.” Its very lifelike design stands at odds with its somewhat stilted speaking patterns and not-quite-natural movements to dispel any illusions of a truly mimetic reproduction of Riley’s humanity.

Then, however, there was the time that I saw it “opened up.”

“Robo-Riley”—the nickname that I had affectionately ascribed to the replica—had been experiencing some technical difficulties and needed a bit of servicing. At this juncture, the technician opened its dapper early-twentieth-century raiment of felt coat and linen shirt to expose a blinking array of servos and mechanical gewgaws housed within a translucent chassis where a human torso would have been. The effect was so utterly jarring (taking the uncanniness of the automated doppelgänger to acute new dimensions for me) that I shamelessly hastened right on by the room and right on up to the staff offices.

It has been some years since my internship at the museum concluded, but even now, as I recall that intensely discomfiting instance of a mechanized reincarnation of a turn-of-the-century

Black businessman/educator, the image is one with no mere modicum of potency. Robo-Riley becomes a signification of synthesis: the function of somatic mimesis of Riley-the-human’s historical presence, and the form of Riley-the-replica’s technological, “futuristic” presence. It stands as a hybridized manifestation of Blackness as historical ontology, and an embodied mechanized future. It signifies the crossroads, where not-quite-reconciled human/machine and past/future dyads collapse in upon one another within “one dark body,” to crib from Du Bois (3).

The lifting from the that oft-quoted line in The Souls of Black Folk is not mere pithy aptness. Understanding the nature of contentious duality in the signifiers of lived and literary experiences of Black folk has unique and pressing merit upon my subsequent work in unpacking the implications of representing the somatic in Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction (Thaler 4).

Making such claims as I do that the imagined spaces posited by Black writers theorizing through cognitive estrangement and defamiliarization in this realm of genre fiction has no less to gain from a foundational understanding of the impacts of “Double Consciousness” than literary approaches of a more realist, or mimetic bent. A point I intend to further unpack below.

Nevertheless, it is the multivalent sign of that “one dark body” that is what initially prompted my queries into its speculative manifestations. But while the Du Bois quote—in conjunction with the epigraph from Ellison’s Invisible Man —serve as a critical point of discussion regarding the my subsequent engagement with Black embodied subjectivity, the kernel of an idea for the project outlined below was actually derived from my reading of Ta-

Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me . In framing his thesis of the open letter to his son,

Coates asks the plaintive question “how do I live free in this Black body” (12)? This matter of framing Blackness in terms of the existential, the somatic, and the ontological was highly provocative, and I found myself mulling its larger implications, not only for its ramifications in the immediate, but also in the subjunctive and speculative future times.

My considerations of the conundrum that freedom and the Black somatic pose are situated in their relevance to Black American Speculative Fiction. To this corner of the expansive field of African American literature I seek to begin my analyses by applying methodological and thematic points gleaned from the theses of Carol E. Henderson’s Scarring the Black Body , and Hortense Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American

Grammar.” These two works’ understanding of fictional and historical Black bodies allow for a critical reading of such bodies as texts that serve as counterpoint to persistent strands of hegemonic discourse within American historiography. Engaging with the themes of these texts, and applying their theories to primary source fiction analyses do much to provide a critical

underpinning for the larger significance of the textual aesthetics of Black somatic representations and their status as recurrent element of contemporary Black American ontological discourse within speculative genres. I hold that such representational approaches constitute a major

(whether sublimated or overt) component of the various strands of the Black American literary canon throughout its historical genesis and progression. Whether the issue is one of asserting/contesting authority over the body as we see in the slave narrative genre, or one of internal conflict between facets of an embodied double consciousness, or one of asserting a foundational right to exist (and to “matter,” in the parlance of contemporary social activism) in the face of systemic white supremacy, I hold that the case of literature-as-discursive-space for the somatic is a key aspect of its larger socio-historical significance within the American cultural landscape.

The larger implication, we can infer from readings of Henderson and Spillers, is that in spite of the legal and historical fact of emancipation from institutional bondage, the social and political landscapes of America are such that the very act of embodying Blackness as a socially constructed mode of identity is to place the somatic in a state of dismembered trauma, remembered scarring, and the ubiquitous history that links them both. For the present dissertation project then, I pull from the scholarship and cultural criticism of, Henderson, Spillers, Paul C.

Taylor, Alexander Weheliye, Patricia Hill Collins, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, and Paul Gilroy to discuss and extrapolate upon theories of ontological tension between inhabiting a Black body in various spacetimes wherein American society actively grapples with elements systemic and institutional anti-Black racisms. I use these theories of Black somatics as means to situate their manifestations in Black science- and speculative fictions. Thus located within this subsection of the larger discursive field of “African American Literature,” I read the body in Black Atlantic

speculative fiction as site of a host of different sorts of temporal enaction that stretch both forward into the imagined societies and social landscapes of the future, and back into the reimagined historical spaces of the antebellum American past. Such fictions of Blackness’s relationship to a state of spatio-temporal flux can be readily incorporated into the artistic aesthetic and critical framework of Afrofuturism, which author and practitioner Ytasha Womack defines as “a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future” that “combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs” (9). By exploring the conventions and methodologies of representing Black bodies in time, I set the conceptual stage for a conversation about what is at stake when those bodies become enmeshed within a sort of less-uncanny technological transhumanism. I investigate fictional embodied crossroads figures of a more sophisticated sort than Robo-Riley, and seek to unpack the multitudinous questions that they pose for speculating

Blackness in various temporal circumstances.

Reading Steven Barnes, and Discussions of Extant Scholarship

I posit my reading here as one at least partially derived from my understanding of the figure of the robotic Mr. Riley: that depictions of the speculative Black body are ones that are always-already in a state of temporal flux. We might highlight these Afrofuturistic speculations, which exist in Black Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) literature, highlight this temporality and the various factors impacting the existence of the Black body as both historicized subjectivity and somatic text of futuristic imaginary. I contend here that Future Bodies within Black SFF canon are thus marked by history, and as a result are especially temporally overdetermined. I seek to explore the various manifestations of this confluence of time, the somatic, and

subjectivity, through a focused reading of the novels of contemporary Black SFF author, Steven

Barnes.

Barnes is perhaps, if not exactly singularly, at the very least ideally placed to stage a conversation of the sort this project endeavors to undertake. This is due, in large part, to his oeuvre representing a truly multifaceted approach to figuring Blackness across a gamut of speculative “otherwheres” and “otherwhens.” In the course of the nearly two dozen novels he has written and co-written, Barnes explores his Black characters' embodied subjectivities in the face of an array of defamiliarized socio-historical exigencies and chronicles their adventures in coming to terms with their respective identities along the way. Through dalliances with the conventions of alternate history ( Lion’s Blood, 2002), dark fantasy ( Iron Shadows, 1998), and cyberpunk-adjacent ( Firedance, 1993) science fictions, he creates an imagined spacetime to unpack masculinity, homosocial bonding and interracial friendships, love, and heroism.

However, given that Barnes is a writer possessing nearly four decades’ worth of canon, some limitations will need to be imposed upon the breadth of his work for the purposes of the present inquiry. My analyses primarily focus on Barnes’s solo works 1 from the 1980s to the early

2000s; and among those, only upon the original pieces not adapted from other SF multimedia franchises, such as the work he has done in writing novels in the Star Wars , Assassin’s Creed , and Star Trek expanded literary universes. Limiting my survey of Barnes’s bibliography thusly allows me to best explore the texts that are most productive in the context of exploring Blackness and Black somatics in his oeuvre.

1 Barnes also has had a well-established career as a collaborator with other speculative/science fictionists, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell. More besides, he has also co-written, with Tananarive Due and actor, Blair Underwood, works that constitute a rather uncharacteristic foray into urban contemporary fiction within the Tennyson Hardwick series.

This dissertation’s sustained study of Barnes’s novels ultimately has its roots in what I identify to be a comparative scholarly lacuna about his contributions to the larger canon of Black

SFF and Black Atlantic speculative fiction. Whereas gallons of ink have justifiably been spilled in discussions of Barnes’s predecessors and contemporaries among Black SFF writers, such as

Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, scholarship on his fiction is rather less extensive. By unpacking what I hold to be the unifying elements of Blackness, masculinity, and embodied subjectivity in representative novels from across Barnes’s oeuvre, I propose to stage a kind of recuperative intervention and validate a critical space that his fiction might occupy.

This is not to say that to read and analyze Barnes’s fiction is to traverse completely untrammeled intellectual ground. Elements of extant scholarship that focus on Barnes’s fiction do attempt to bridge the gaps between his standalone projects and the larger franchises he has written for. Sandra Grayson's Visions of the Third Millennium , for example, dedicates a full chapter to Barnes, but does so by juxtaposing his SF novel Firedance alongside an episode of

Star Trek: Deep Space 9 that Barnes wrote the script for (100). Other scholarship dealing with

Barnes is likewise less-than-comprehensive in focus, privileging either themes specific texts are reflective of, or generalized, taxonomic readings his oeuvre as part of nascent canon of Black

Atlantic Speculative Fiction. Isaiah Lavender makes a reference to Lion's Blood in his Race in

American Science Fiction to serve as an example of his concept of meta-slavery (80), and Barnes is name-dropped in other works that seek to create an aggregate listing of Black writers

(Womack's Afrofuturism , Dery's “Black to the Future”, and the collection of essays, The Black

Imagination ), and is a featured author in the first of the two volumes of Sheree R. Thomas’s

Dark Matter anthologies. This dissertation, however, proposes to do sustained academic work with his novels of a sort that does not exist in any as-yet-published monograph.

This taxonomic and generic mode of situating Barnes’s fiction is a starting point for readings in Andre M. Carrington’s monograph, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in

Science Fiction (178) . And, like Grayson, Carrington begins by unpacking the author’s contributions to the same Star Trek episode, “Far Beyond the Stars,” as part of a chapter-length inquiry into its significance in creating an historically-aware metatext of Black Atlantic

Speculative Fiction. Speculative Blackness’ s work dovetails a reading of the episode—wherein the Black captain of the eponymous space station finds himself vicariously experiencing life in two different time periods: the futuristic “present” and the mid twentieth century of segregated

America—with elements of Barnes’s literary oeuvre. Such an approach to using the episode works to highlight Barnes’s SFF projects’ use of historical reimagining of space(s) for gendered

Black identities to exist. Thus, Carrington puts is able to stage an analysis of the novels Great

Sky Woman, Shadow Valley, Lion’s Blood and Zulu Heart (184-5).

Beyond the critical engagement with temporizing Blackness within the imagined spaces of the past, though, Speculative Blackness ’s cites interviews that Barnes has given, wherein

Carrington picks up on the novelist’s preoccupation with creating Black male hero figures. The chapter in question zeroes in on a line of utterance Barnes gave in an afterword for the novelization of Far Beyond the Stars , where we see the novelist describe his creative process thus: “if there is any most central reason I began to write, it is that there was no father in my home, and I needed to find images of men doing manly stuff” (Qtd in Carrington 179). This, at least as much as the work with history and temporality, is gesturing in a direction that I have constructed this dissertational project to push further along: I am interested in asking the questions that might be attendant to representing “manly stuff,” and having the men doing it be unambiguously racially legible as being Black. In all of the works under consideration in the

present project—Lion’s Blood , Blood Brothers , Firedance , and Iron Shadows —Barnes proffers

Black male heroes who acknowledge but also subvert master narratives and controlling images of what such embodied Black masculinity can mean.

In the vein of Carrington’s points, I hold that the questions of intersectional gendered/racial identities gain an additional dimension through Barnes’s fiction’s engagement with a particular kind of historicity. This is something that has garnered him a modicum of attention by other scholars who engage specifically with his work. Jeffery Allen Tucker’s chapter within the Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature and Juan F. Elices’s contribution to Science Fiction, Imperialism, and the Third World both read the Lion’s

Blood/Zulu Heart duology as crafting a space within narratives of historical time that challenge hegemonic (and archaic) modes of discourse about Black folks and “civilization”. The former by interrogating the works as part of a larger conversation with the form of the neo-slave narrative and its postmodern attempt to reimagine the experiences of those in bondage; the latter by focusing on the cultural, linguistic, and theologic aspects of the novels that render them as part of a rather larger, Diasporic take on Blackness as mode of anticolonial resistance.

As the above survey suggests, that the preponderance of extant scholarship on Barnes as a participant in Black SFF approaches focuses in rather disproportionately upon the Insh'allah books. This is, of course, not without some reason, as the works proffer a remarkably ambitious intellectual project in their re-framing of so central an aspect of American history. They are also participant within well-traveled lines of field- and genre-specific discourse and critique and reflect a salient contribution by Barnes to the larger corpus of postmodern narratives about slavery.

But while good and meaningful scholarship has been done in unpacking Lion's Blood and

Zulu Heart , however, I contend that the other segments of Barnes’s canon are equally significant as engagements with technoculture and the fantastic. The dearth of scholarship upon the Aubry

Knight books as Black answer to movement cyberpunk, for example, is a lacuna that is in critical need of redress. A point that cyberpunk scholar Sherryl Vint acknowledges in the review of

Thomas Foster’s 2005 monograph, The Souls of Cyberfolk, wherein that author attempts to address the significance of race within movement cyberpunk fiction to the critical elision of SF novels by Black folk (310).

As for actual readings of Barnes’s fiction, these are sometimes—Carrington’s above- mentioned work notwithstanding—also presented as segmented and not benefitting from a more complete familiarity with his canon. For example, while Lavender discusses Lion’s Blood to frame a reading of the work as a text of meta-slavery, he likewise levies some rather contentious criticism of the book’s falling back on what he seems to suggest is a rather facile re-inscription of Black-white dichotomizing at the expense of racialized groups who fall without that polemical framing (87). I find this approach to be—if potentially meaningful critique for the book as standalone project—complicated by perspectives garnered in others of his novels. By way of counterexample, we consider that the city of Los Angeles, in all its demographic and cultural diversity, exists as a recurrent signifier in the larger corpus of Barnes’s novels, and has remained a spatial nexus for much of his contemporary and futurist works, of which the Insh’allah books might not be counted (set, as they are, in an alternate history version of Galveston Bay and environs). As such, his works writ-large present a world where, across multiple series’ timelines,

Blackness abuts Chicano, Native, and Asian American identities, as well as whiteness. Points that extant scholarship on his canon seems to not fully engage.

Of course, this aspect of his fiction invites other angles of critique that extant scholarship has only gestured towards. My reading of his work suggests that Barnes’s novels can and have presented this American ethnic mélange in a manner that has not always been for the purposes of analysis and sustained intellectual inquiry. Instead, the demographics in Streetlethal , for example, function less as a means of unpacking what Blackness and a Black body might mean in the then-future landscape of a twenty-first century megacity, and more simply as a reflection of the city’s contemporary diversity. The novel does little to politicize what was essentially a backdrop of the social landscape. Nonetheless, it should go without saying that deigning to imagine a space wherein the future is not homogenized through demographic white-out (in the vein of Richard Pryor’s famous jokes about Logan’s Run 2), might also be staging ground for a particular kind of more subtle sarkaesthetic integration of the future; one that asks the reader to be open enough to envision a Black cyberpunk hero and his multiracial love interest as they topple a Latino-run crime syndicate. But the bodies in question are less reflections of an interrogated racial historicity so much as they are figures who just happen to be nonwhite.

To mark a moment of paradigm shift in his oeuvre’s work with issues of race and identity, Barnes himself has spoken to a rather significant stage of his career around the time of the publication of his 1989 novel, Gorgon Child, in that novel’s afterword (344). Prior to that moment, in novels such as The Descent of Anansi (1982), Streetlethal (1983), and The Kundalini

Equation (1986), Barnes’s fictive contemporary/future urban landscapes present characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds and present some point-of-view characters who are themselves

Black. All the same, I argue that, at this stage in his career, his writing never takes a stance to

2 As quoted in a 2005 Washington Post article by Desson Thomson: “The sci-fi movie Logan’s Run , he once said in that screechy, high-pitched timbre, had no Black people in it, which meant ‘white folks ain’t planning for us to be here. That’s why we gotta make movies, and we be in the future.’”

meaningfully address what Fanon has called “fact of Blackness.” The central characters (and the city they live in) are rendered as ahistorical bodies, and present themselves only as men (for they are all men), who happen to be Black.

Indeed, while Gorgon Child only gestures towards a kind of historicized racial awareness, the very next solo novel Barnes published—1993’s Firedance —enthusiastically suggests an immersion in a mode of Afro-Diasporic consciousness. The works that followed it only refine that trajectory: 1996’s Blood Brothers presents a fusion of dark fantasy and neo-slave narrative tropes; 2002’s Charisma explores the clay feet of contemporary (fictionalized) Civil

Rights advocates; and the Insh’Allah duology—Lion’s Blood (2002) and Zulu Heart (2003)— attempts to re-write the whole history of Western civilization from an Afrocentric perspective.

Blackness in these later texts is rather more substantial than a physiological quirk of epidermal happenstance. It is an intensely palpable manifestation of past and future ontological conundrums within the physical spaces of America in general.

Afrofuturism as Methodology

Which perhaps positions us to address the issues of how to frame subsequent scholarly discourse about Barnes’s novels inasmuch as they reflect particular generic and ideological stances. In this regard, while we have hitherto been discussing Barnes’s novels as indicative of a

Black SFF set of genre conventions, I have taken to using Ingrid Thaler’s term, “Black Atlantic

Speculative Fictions,” in light of the dynamic American-and-diasporic dialogue that increasingly insinuates itself into his oeuvre (4). This semantic and taxonomic move for situating Barnes’s novels provides an approach to mapping the spacetime of his characters identities and helps to situate him as part of a canon of writers of fantastic fiction whose backgrounds represent

Blackness in a host of different ways.

The question of genre becomes further muddied due specifically to the fact that Barnes’s work—in frank disinterest to aspirations of being the next great African American novel—is instead self-described “adventure” writing 3. But these Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction novels signify on both the rather pulpy form of SF that hearkens (paradoxically) to Gernsback and

Gibson, and elements of the African American literary traditions. Viewed this way, I would certainly contend that his Black heroes’ journeys reflect a particular kind of genre- fiction/paraliterature approach that is certainly still legible as cultural engagement rather than mere escapism. This, at least in part, because of his speculations’ readily discernible historical recursion and work within the American socio-cultural milieu of identity and body politics.

Inasmuch as the Black body itself becomes a signifier of historical processes, social constructions of identity, and the science and pseudosciences of alterity, Barnes’s fiction and its rendering of these kinds of bodies becomes a site for application of the conceptual and aesthetic framework of “Afrofuturism.” Coined in a 1993 essay by SF critic Mark Dery, the oft-cited foundational definition of Afrofuturism:

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called “Afrofuturism.” (180)

More contemporary theorists have pushed the boundaries of the term in the decades since its inception (as we see in the collection, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness , edited by

Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones), and now it is no longer solely understood as a synonym for Black SFF, or even Black Atlantic speculative fiction (vii-viii). Instead,

3 Not, we should note, dissimilar to texts composed by Barnes’s fellow Black science fictionists, Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, both of whom (Delany’s swashbuckling text, The Jewels of Aptor , for example, and the gene- bending, multi-generational saga of Lilith Iyapo’s progeny in Butler’s Xenogenesis books) have likewise written work that might be understood as occasionally dabbling in the tropes and conventions of pulp and adventure novels.

Afrofuturism of a kind that provides coherence to a reading of Barnes, might be understood as a markedly twenty-first century ontological and phenomenological reconceptualization of the very nature of historicized Blackness in global thought and letters.

A reconceptualization of a sort that allows authors (and artists more broadly) to occupy are intimately invested in the persistence of elements of the Africana and Afrodiasporic past. So too are the defamiliarized presents, and counterfactual pasts. The Black Imagination as reified and strategically essentialized tool allows for the artist to create new visions of otherness that refuse the "easy-out" of fundamentally detaching from the implications of extant socio-historical constructs. It likewise denies the primacy of what Fanon describes as the "racial epidermal schema" (112). In other words, whilst utilizing the language and tropes of SF for the purposes of defamiliarizing core concepts of Black identity and historical circumstances, writers like Barnes can effectively push back against the overriding social constructs of racial hierarchy that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy trades in. Afrofuturism, as such, allows for a proactive way of utilizing the racial imaginary to analyze and deconstruct the entire artifice—the entire scientific fiction, as it were—of Euro-American conceptions of race as a charged mode of identity.

Barnes’s fiction becomes legible through the framework of Afrofuturism as it provides a means by which to broach questions of his works surrounding their work with temporality, somatics, and “The Future” as discrete site of ideological defamiliarization. Such a reading of his novels also serves to ground the project in a part of a larger discussion vis-à-vis the persistence of racism, and the potential to speculate worlds and bodies of otherwhens that might be forced to engage with it differently. Especially inasmuch as the somatic and embodied Black identities are constructed, I argue that such phenomena are given intellectual heft to them by virtue of the author’s willingness to engage them.

Bodies of Future Past

I contend that the Afrofuturist dimensions of Barnes’s work posit speculative spaces wherein the existence of the Black body, in spite of all the varied and sundry modes of fantastic and technological forces arrayed against it, is nonetheless depicted as having achieved a host of means of agential autonomy. The answers to Coates’s question, “how do I live free in this Black body?” are not always easy in Barnes’s speculative, Afrofuturist timelines (12). As the novels in question engage with questions of this sort, they sketch a through line of Black ontology and phenomenology by frequently putting a pronounced emphasis upon the important linkages between the somatic and the numinal (with shades of psychological and spiritual).

Such a through-line appears most readily in relationship to depictions of Black masculinity. Barnes’s novels are, in their consistent foregrounding so visible a male-bodied take on Black somatics, arguably less immediately concerned with problematizing heteronormativity or provision of spaces for fully actualized modes of queered sexualities than might be found in his predecessors and contemporaries in Black paraliterature like Octavia Butler or Samuel

Delany. There is, for example, a discernible dearth of Black women in his texts of the 1980s, and those who begin to appear in later works and still need to be read with perhaps more than a modicum of critical discernment vis-à-vis their contrasting juxtaposition to their respective male counterparts. However, his literary efforts in problematizing the iconography of Black masculinities have been, from the earliest moments of his solo career, an important hallmark of his oeuvre, and the issues of non-male, non-cisgendered, and queer folks are notably mapped in intriguing ways on his fiction's conceptual geographies (with varying degrees of success). The bodies—male, female, and elsewhere along the gender spectrum—that figure into the various fictive worlds of Barnes’s works provide ample material for my readings of Black somatics in

time. This, both in terms of reading the subversive signifying on the trope of the Black hypermasculine somatic sublime, and in his ability to inject genuine pathos into the psyches contained within those bodies.

This dissertation’s critical study of Barnes’s oeuvre focuses primarily on these Black bodily concerns in order to read a consistent thread of discourse surrounding his framing of the physical body as a site of enacting embodied subjectivity and social identity formation. These bodies’ continued existence in his novel’s diverse spatio-temporal contexts would be reason enough to attempt critical analysis and assessment of Barnes’s place within the canon of Black

SFF literature 4. But perhaps all the more so when his characters’ bodies are coded per the specific exigencies of gender and global dimensions of racialization and ethno-national/diasporic identity.

In light of such circumstance, we might well understand also that the various challenges facing Black bodies are manifestations of equally varied and potentially traumatic historical processes. As Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks , within the context of colonial circumstances or other manifestations of socio-cultural white hegemony, the Black subject exists as simultaneously responsible for body, race, and (in what we might read as an important departure from DuBoisean dualisms) ancestry (112). That fictive work on Black somatic constructions represent persons who are not static or ahistorical, but who are instead dynamic entities that owe their existence to a unique experience of temporality.

4 Works by Afrofuturist theorists (frequently within the realm of cultural studies) academics and those by Black SFF writers have done much to establish critical and theoretical boundaries to engage the questions of what the larger implications of Afrofuturism might be. Curiously, neither Dark Matter (and the essays within), nor Grayson’s Visions of the Third Millennium , mention Afrofuturism by name, though each appears (respectively) seven and ten years after Dery’s coinage of the term. The initial imperative in terms of crafting a means of theorizing Black SFF texts put a premium on the taxonomic act of recovering and defining the tradition of Black authors. The organizational imperative that ran parallel to preliminary gestures towards Afrofuturism as larger aesthetic project necessitated an effort to collect and appraise the texts of the scant few Black authors who seemed to be consistently publishing SFF texts.

Reading the ways that Black SFF texts, and Black Atlantic speculative fiction more broadly wrestle with the concerns of the body is, I contend, quite productive indeed. Such discussions in relation Barnes’s novels are perhaps even more ideally placed, given his position within the African American canon of speculative fiction, and his work’s tendency to foreground issues pertinent to the somatic, sarkaesthetic 5, and embodied subjective experiences of his characters. Parsing the fantastical fictions and historicized controlling images of Black bodies in

Barnes’s oeuvre and elsewhere in the canon of Black SFF literature allows for meaningful conversations to be had about what might be said to be America’s original science fiction: that of race itself.

Positioning the methodologies of fictively representing the Black body as a discrete ontological space, however, is an exercise that quickly meets with complicating factors. From a semantic standpoint, the matter of “Blackness” itself, in this case as an always-already overdetermined marker of a specific social history, is something of a fraught signifier. A foundational move, then, should be to engage with it in order to help understand its ontic and historical relationship with the somatic and subjective spaces it is so readily imbricated with.

Doing thus allows us to, in a manner after Alexander Weheliye in his Habeas Viscus , meaningfully read the Black body’s positioning relative to the “relational intensities between human physiology and flesh,” which he identifies as “racializing assemblages” (50).

Complementing my reading of Weheliye’s approach of reading both Blackness and the

Black body as assembled from a host of different embodied, social and historical markers (as opposed to mere static signifier of arbitrary authenticity), I find Michelle Wright’s 2015 monograph, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology to be particularly

5 A term Paul C. Taylor utilizes in his commentary upon the aesthetic rendering of bodies as fleshly signs. Derived from the Greek “sarx,” as a means of contrasting with “soma” (108).

helpful. Herein, Wright posits that Blackness exists as epiphenomenon, and is most widely and foundational understood, not solely as a manifestation of a particular kind of biology or historicism, but as a complicated and broadly conceived nexus-point of spacetime (4).

Wright’s understanding of Blackness in this light breaks the monopolizing hold of the

Middle Passage as epistemic master narrative. Such an epistemology is one that renders the historical past as overdetermined in its essentializing hold on conferring a species of

“authenticity” to the temporal experiences enacted within and upon the bodies Black cisgender- heterosexual male figures, which comprise but a fraction of the larger ontology of Black peoples.

An accounting for such an inordinate preponderance of their narratives within the body of historical grapplings with an overdetermined and problematically “authenticating” Middle

Passage experience, speaks to the need for a kind of drastic corrective (9-10).

This, likewise, jibes with what popular theorist and writer of Afrofuturist fiction, Ytasha

Womack explains as the “Time Warp of Horror” (61). Blackness as an epiphenomenal historicized process , rather than a static, "authenticatable" makes for a possible pushback against its being overdetermined by a hegemonic historiography. The interplay between a contestable and radically destabilized Black past, and a mutable future delimited only by the imagination, allows for a much broader project for reading and understanding what Blackness can mean, and how it might be expressed.

With that in mind, I make my central contention here that the formulation of Black

American SFF is particularly indebted to this understanding and signifying of epiphenomena of somatic significance. In analyses of defamiliarizing the contestation over Black bodies as commodity, as culture-producers, and as site of unique sapience and creative genius, I wish to make the argument that Black American SFF (within the larger discursive frame of Black

Atlantic speculative fiction) allows for additional unique insights through reading these bodies in space, time, and spacetime 6.

And in such instances as history and the Black body itself collide? My intellectual endeavors in reading the Black body as ontic construct do owe much to antecedent theoretical frameworks, such as the reification of embodied Blackness and the dichotomization between

“body” and “flesh,” found in Hortense Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (260).

But perhaps equally important in its situating of the Black American body as having been marked by history is Carol E. Henderson’s monograph, Scarring the Black Body .

Henderson explores the topos of the scar—that bodily mark of historicized pain and trauma—and does meaningful work in identifying the concept’s discursive pliability, and duality of temporalized natures. That the scar itself might be either indicative of the wound or trauma itself or the evidentiary manifestation of healing action, puts a hefty bit of significance upon a reading of the somatic within the fiction of Black American authors. Henderson speaks to the risks inherent in re-inscribing the Cartesian dualism of Blackness as merely a condition of the flesh here, and that there might be a considerable epistemic harm done in totally eschewing the very “souls” of Black folk in so doing (8-9). All the same, the reading of Black bodies as texts and in their relationship with texts can likewise be a helpful way of creating space for these bodies to exist, when so much of the effort historically expended by the American “body politic” has been towards a legal negation of those bodies’ right to exist.

6 Insights which, I contend, are distinct in key ways from non-SF, postmodernist Black literatures. Whereas there are considerable defamiliarizing efforts relative to the experiences of Black bodies on display in the wryly iconoclastic novels of a Percival Everett, or the fantastical/mythic works of Gloria Naylor, there is, I will argue, an important methodological element at play in Black SFF that differentiates its capabilities from contemporary works with less immediately highlighted “literary” connotations. We may presume that SFF’s uniqueness may lie in its ability to imagine and depict imagined instances that exist elsewhere in spacetime, and as such, stand as sites of different manifestations of the Epiphenomenon of Blackness.

As helpful as I find Henderson’s work with literary scars in fiction by authors like

Morrison, Petry, and Ellison, I propose that Black SFF lends us a unique opportunity to go a step further in speculating Blackness as embodied history and subjectivity. The scar may signify a biological attempt on the part of the Black body to stage a kind of socio-historical convalescence.

But suppose we opted to consider a mechanical, or technological palliative in its stead? Within the realms of the possible (beyond the merely probable), Black SFF’s ability to take even greater license than historical fiction and fiction grounded in historical settings, makes its potential work with history itself as well as future time equally as imaginative in scope and function. I look to

Sandra M. Grayson’s monograph, Visions of the Third Millennium , for demonstrable efforts to highlight the necessary distinctions being made here (3). Her work and Wright's offer compelling analyses of the ubiquity of diaspora and return as demarcated across spacetime, and give meaningful weight to the particular ways that SFF works by Black authors allow for much- needed commentary upon the ways that the past is remembered and rearticulated upon present and futures.

There is a growing array of texts available in the task of unpacking the historical, quantum, epiphenomenal, and cyborg manifestations of Blackness in Black Atlantic speculative fiction. My work, whilst centered upon a reading of Steven Barnes, will broaden both the impact and efficacy of its dimensions by putting his texts in conversation with his contemporaries, forebears, and successors in this sort of genre work.

Foundations of Barnes’s Afrofuturist Somatic: A Preliminary Look at The Kundalini Equation and Streetlethal

The foundations for such somatic discussions can be readily seen in both the 1983 Aubry

Knight novel, Streetlethal , and 1986’s The Kundalini Equation . Both early texts can be read in concert with one another as highlighting the twined, but potentially paradoxical trajectories that

would go on to define the nature of Barnes’s work with embodied Blackness. On the one hand,

Streetlethal presents in its "hero," an unambiguously (but largely ahistorical and apolitical) Black man, who is defined by his sheer “brute” physicality. Aubry is a SF pugilist—a zero-gravity boxer—who made a career for himself, and sculpted his physique through fighting in exhibition and circuit matches in licensed and publicized arenas in Earth orbit. In the novel and its sequels, his very presence exudes a latent capacity for violence kept in check solely by his overwhelming personal discipline and training. But coded as he is by his status as a wrongfully accused ex-con as well, his narrative is one that is likewise defined by an imperative of conflated revenge and redemption. For Aubry, as a fighter and as a man, his sense of psychological and emotional understandings of honor become intensely imbricated in his sense of self enhancement and physiological perfection.

While it echoes the theming of somatic perfectability as enmeshed in a framing narrative of psychological/numinal refinement, The Kundalini Equation does so in a way that is a trifle peculiar for Barnes’s non-collaborative/non-“extended universe” canon: the novel’s protagonist is a white male. Adam Ludlum is initially quite far from Aubry Knight in ways beyond simple racial identifiers as well, being one who is initially as physically unremarkable as he is lacking in any sort of ambition or focus (save for a rather obsessive desire to reconnect with an estranged ex-lover, Michelle). But upon embarking upon a mystical path of self-refinement through meditation, martial-arts, and embracing the—admittedly—vaguely Orientalist teachings of a fictional guru with a particularly violent bent, Adam becomes an embodiment of brute physicality with a functional equivalence to Aubry.

What is worth additional attention in the context of The Kundalini Equation , however, is the secondary character, Algernon Swain. An assistant at a UCLA exercise physiology lab,

Algernon represents a rather different sort of body altogether: one that is marked by its

Blackness at least as much as by its stark opposition to any and all historicized, reductivist images of hypermasculine encoding. Within the context of this novel, and others of Barnes’s canon as well, we see the author creating space for Black “nerdiness” or the appropriation of the somatic figuration of the archetypal of “computer geek.” A depiction that stands in all the sharper contrast when read against the hulking powerhouse that his white friend, Adam, becomes by the novel’s end.

The Aubry Knight books are something of an outlier in this regard, but Kundalini ’s juxtaposition of white “muscle” and Black “brains” is a motif of no mean happenstance in the canon of Barnes’s novels. One of the more significant undertakings that his reworking of heroic archetypes seems to suggest is an active subversion of the masculine dyad identified by Eldridge

Cleaver in Soul on Ice as the Black "Supermasculine Menial" and the white "Omnipotent

Administrator" (208).

In directly engaging with these historicized tropes of raced masculinities, Barnes’s fiction externalizes a the deeper tensions that exist within the characters themselves. Throughout his canon, Barnes’s characters quest for balance in their lives, and the processes resist Cartesian reductivisms and cogito-ergo-sum psychical privileging by requiring of them recognition and development of their selves, holistically. This is manifest within by recognizing the various ways to nurture body, mind, and spirit in equal portion; it is also manifest without by recognizing the artifice of racial stereotyping and forging homosocial bonds of camaraderie across racial lines that mutually acknowledge the other/Other as a total person and embodied subject in his own right.

Adam and Algernon reflect precisely this kind of reconciled duality. Each character has been friend to the other for decades, and thus is witness to the other as manifestation of both archetype and attendant, complicating subjectivity. Adam's monstrous physicality—through the guru's training regimen that "unlocks his potential" and allows for a “conquest of the flesh”—is empowering, but potentially distancing, as the more power he gains, the less of his "humanity" he retains. It is through his empathetic connections to Algernon, who initially helps chart his friends progress with a host of scientific experiments, but ultimately wants only to help his friend come back from the abyssal nether of violence.

This discussion of reconciling masculinities in embodied racialized subjects is, however, but one way that Barnes looks to have his characters express and explore the importance of interactions with one another. Likewise broached in both Kundalini and Streetlethal (though arguably not fully realized as core thematic until 1998's Iron Shadows ), Barnes’s novels also feature a foregrounded significance of heterosexual physical intimacy as a defining facet of characterization and character development. The somatic unions of cisgendered male and female characters are further underscored in each novel by the concomitant fusion of the psychic/numinal dimensions of their subjectivities. Heterosexual intercourse thus becomes conduit and foundation for potentially holistic connection between embodied figures.

But such a reading nonetheless is frequently problematical in its execution. Unlike the inversions of racial tropes and archetypes bound up in the homosocial "Buddy" bonding of white and Black men in Barnes’s novels, the connections between men and women implied in these moments of physical intimacy instead reify and re-inscribe the very particular roles attendant to the dimensions of gendering. The situation becomes the more complicated early in his canon, as the novels prior to the millennium's turn, offer very little in terms of actual depictions of Black

femininity at all (with the critical discrepancy of Blood Brothers , which I explore in chapter three). In the main, such romantic intimacies as are presented in these texts feature women of racially ambiguous dimension, as in the Aubry Knight trilogy's Promise Cotonu, or who are themselves white, such as Iron Shadows' Portia and Kundalini's Michelle. Black women do appear in Barnes’s canon, especially in his more recent novels, but their status within the schema of racial reconciliation and humanistic articulation.

Chapters and Themes

At stake in this systematic dissection and analysis of multiple novels in Barnes’s canon is the above-mentioned intervention within what is presently coalescing as a scholarly canon of

Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction. In what follows, I attempt to provide the sustained and holistic—from Streetlethal to Zulu Heart —scholarly investigation of the significant work being done with various manifestations of Black somatic figuration his solo publications towards the end of the twentieth century. I offer that they represent the creation important SFF and

Afrofuturist spaces for theorizing ontic Blackness and the somatic experiences of Black men and

(to a lesser extent) women. Although such spaces allow for pushback against the controlling images of Black bodies as overdetermined by specific historical circumstances, reductivist archetypes, and pathologized notions of “authenticity,” I hope to present productive analysis and critique of certain aspects of them all the same.

In the five subsequent chapters, I address the role and conveyance of Black somatics within Barnes’s oeuvre. Methodologically speaking, the goal in each is to highlight at least one text from his multiple series, and to explore its work with embodiement and intersectional nexes of race, class, and gender. To further speak to the uniqueness of Barnes’s approach, I will further

explore the ways that his novels differ in their approaches to Afrofuturist literary endeavors by his contemporaries and influences.

To undertake this project, however, is to necessarily engage with the larger chronopolitics of Barnes’s fictive endeavors, and to parse his efforts to interrogate Blackness in time. With the foundational understanding that Afrofuturism as a project is itself actively invested in reclaiming time and space for Black subjectivities against the master narratives of Eurocentric historiography, this dissertation reads Barnes’s novels as charting an alternative past, present, and future grounded in notions of racial reconciliation. In using the techniques of Black SFF writing, the novels under scrutiny here posit bodies of difference that represent increasingly political commentary on who gets remembered, who does the remembering, and what those memories mean, going forward in time.

In recognition of this repudiation of the Cartesian split and unifying of Black bodies, I posit that Barnes’s fiction itself hinges upon using the Black body, in concert with mind and spirit, as a text in and of itself. Such depictions of bodies within the narrative-framing of his SFF adventures work specifically as texts to tell tales of historical and (counter)remembered time. I read his Insh’allah novels as being particularly indicative of this in their revisitation and reenvisioning of the past. I find that this is also the case for what I will be referring to as the

“Immortal African” duology 7 of Blood Brothers and Iron Shadows . On the one hand, the

Insh’allah books present a contemplation of a layered temporality (or quantum superposition) of the Black body in both precolonial Africa and antebellum America; The “Immortal African” books, on the other hand, allow for an interrogation of violences inflicted upon (and by) Black bodies of comparatively more recent historical moments. The subsequent second and third

7 The series lacks a formal designation in the manner that the Insh’allah and Aubry Knight books have acquired

chapters of the dissertation are structured to give space for analyzing Barnes’s work in reimagining the past and recent-past through the intersectional analysis of the bodies of the Black men and women who survived that history.

In addressing the Black body as historical text and embodied countermemory to the master narratives of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, I offer as one of the first places to treat with this ubiquity of racial harm in other temporal nexuses, a discussion of Black bodies within the SF subgenre of the historical counterfactual, or alternate history. In focusing on

Barnes’s 2002 novel, Lion’s Blood , (a work that emerges from the premise of an inversion of the racial color palette of racial formation in the United States during a parallel antebellum moment), the second chapter of the dissertation, “To Flip the Script: Lion’s Blood , Alternate History, and

Narratives of Countermemory in Creating Spacetimes for Black American Bodies” then, seeks to entertain a kind of sustained interrogation of Black somatic identities through a reading of the overlapping-but-not-necessarily-mutually-inclusive modes of alternate history and what Isaiah

Lavender has identified as the “meta-slave narrative.” While the latter is a postmodern and occasionally fantastical sort of repetition and re-inhabiting/re embodying of the historical realities of American chattel slavery, the former is a way of identifying Lion’s Blood as an even more divergent historical space defined through the actions within a self-contained timeline that have precipitated a divergence in historical time from the route it has taken in the extra-textual, “real world” (Hellekson 10).

The ways that alternate history works within Lion’s Blood bespeak the genre’s methodology and conventions hinging upon a critical investigation of the nature of repetition in time. Though Karen Hellekson’s monograph The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time , models an understanding of historical phenomenology more overtly beholden to a reading of

Heidegger, her understanding of the translations of his concept of “repetition” is almost a verbatim description of the West African concept of Sankofa, hinging upon a notion of “going back to fetch something” (65). To further ground such a reading within the body of scholarship on Afrofuturism as contemporary episteme, I look to Kodwo Eshun’s “Further Considerations of

Afrofuturism,” wherein he suggests methods of directly challenging historical “Master

Narratives” through a chronopolitics of countermemory—of using time and subjective narratives thereof to pushback against hostile attempts to subjugate Afrodiasporic peoples through the usurpation and arrogation of “the past”.

Attendant to preconceptions of history and the broader implications of reworking and re- embodying Blackness as an historical process, I wish to use the third chapter of the project,

“Eternal Darkness: Narrating the Transhistorical Black Body in the Blood Brothers ,” to stage a reading of Barnes’s Immortal African novels. Blood Brothers , suggesting connections with both

Butler’s Kindred and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories , posits a fantastic element that is born of a particular engagement with historical chattel slavery. As inciter of narrative action, Barnes posits an undying Black sorcerer who, through sacrificing his progeny, is able to sustain himself across centuries of existence. Known alternatingly as “The African,” Niles, and “The Scarred

Man,” this malevolent figure serves to represent a monstrous patriarchal presence in the novels; one who destroys his children and descendants as well as his victim and unwilling successor, the bondswoman, Dahlia Childe. Subsequent her tragic demise, Dahlia herself becomes a transhistorical presence as well, though one who is spiritual rather than corporeal. The chapter speaks directly to Blood Brothers and its chronicling of the journeys and implications of these two Black figures (and their immortal white master, Augustus DuPris) across American history to speak to the legacies of bondage each represents. It further seeks to address the way Barnes

depicts their Black bodies and spirits as persistent and violent historical signifiers of moments of oppression as experienced throughout time would be well equipped to do so. The questions of immortality that inform Blood Brothers in particular, which draw with their implications of both lateral antagonism/camaraderie as well as the implications of genealogical time that draws so heavily and so literally from the racially metonymical "blood," as to certainly warrant a meditation thereupon.

The fourth chapter, “Apocalypse Now: Iron Shadows and AfroAsia Methodology in

Afrofuture Speculations,” picks up the analyses of bodies of history in its focus upon the second novel in the Immortal African duology, 1998’s Iron Shadows . But whereas the somatic manifestation of the antebellum past, and its ability to reach forth and grab hold of the lives of

Black and white people of the 1990s was the central element of Niles and DuPris’ transhistorical presence, Blood Brothers ’s spiritual successor novel changes the geography of the embodied pasts by focusing instead on a Transpacific vector of exploring Blackness. My analysis of Iron

Shadows explores the implications of Black-and-Asian multiracial bodies as a means to explore the various dimensions of AfroAsia as a means of reframing historical narratives, and to address what Blackness (and Black bodies) can mean when read outside of the Transatlantic framework.

Such an approach allows for an understanding of the ways anti-Black racisms (as they exist outside of Euro-American contexts, in Japan and elsewhere in Asia) can complicate the potential utopianist coalition-building espoused by writers like Du Bois in his novel, Dark Princess .

Likewise, Iron Shadows also addresses the historical experiences of Black soldiers’ experiences as part of American military interventions on the Asian continent. The novel facilitates conversation about the American occupation of Japan (and Blackness’s role within that historical moment). It also, more directly, brings about conversations surrounding the

experiences of a Black soldier who fought in Vietnam and returned to the US with nightmarish and unreconciled memories of that experience. The racial matrices of Asia that Barnes’s speculative engagements with AfroAsian history expose here, create space for reading the sociohistorical scars on Black and Japanese bodies. The former as a face of imperialist warfighting; and the latter as so Otherized during WWII, as to be subject to the cataclysms of atomic warfare.

The chronopolitics of historical reflection—whether in Transatlantic or Transpacific spaces—defines much of the analysis of the first several chapters of the dissertation. The last two chapters, with their focus on the Aubry Knight trilogy, situate their conversations about the

Black body in time as relative to Afrofuturism as prolepsis. Chapter five, “Soul in the Shell: The

Aubry Knight Trilogy and Cyberpunk Investigations of Technological Black Bodies as Sites of

Recursive Historical Enaction” proposes to investigate the issues of technological bodies in more direct relation to cybernetic enhancement. An undergirding question for this chapter recalls twenty-first century critiques of Haraway’s ahistorical readings of racially distinct manifestations of the body, and might take the shape of, “what does it mean when the Black somatic is physically fused with technology?” Or even, “what, specifically, might the cyborg manifesto mean to Black folk?”

This chapter, of course, is ideally situated for a discussion grounded in a reading of

Barnes’s early oeuvre. The three books in the Aubry Knight trilogy serve as a critical nexus for addressing and unpacking the larger implications of reading Barnes’s work as directly science fictional in execution, rather than the more generally speculative framing of works like Blood

Brothers, The Kundalini Equation, and Iron Shadows . As Sharon DeGraw remarks in The

Subject of Race in American Science Fiction , while the others of these novels do skirt the fuzzy boundaries between SF and speculative fiction in their reliance upon Barnes’s recurrent

fascination with the computer technologies that stood as the cutting edge in the accessible digital realm as it stood in the 1980s and 90s, it was the Aubry Knight books that pushed the narrative envelope into the space of so-called “hard” science fiction (184). The issues in these texts are less digital in their implications as they are cybernetic.

I wish to read Barnes’s novels—here with specific focus on the first and second entries of the trilogy, Streetlethal and Gorgon Child —in light of their efforts in depicting Black embodied subjectivities at the juncture of organic and mechanical. In these two texts, more so than almost any of Barnes’s other novels, we see him directly engaging in themes and tropes of the cyberpunk movement. The works pose significant questions about the nature of bodies as sites of particular subjectivities, and poses these questions as being fraught with larger concerns about how such cynically futurist takes identities can operate vis-à-vis overtly American understandings of race, class, and gender/sexuality.

Both Streetlethal and Gorgon Child suggest a kind of that Cartesian dualism (as part and parcel of a subtext of resurgent Enlightenment era discourse, brought about by “cyberspace’s” potentialities relative to dis/embodied subjectivities), is readily problematized by Barnes’s tentative infusing an historicized understanding of more thoroughly historicized racialized identities into the paradigm. The novels (and Firedance too), as I read them in this chapter, therefore allow for a fruitful site of addressing Blackness, multiraciality, gender dynamics, and desire against the backdrop of futuristic tropes of bio-mechanical augmentation, genetic alteration, and narratives of varying sorts of hybridized and autonomous imagined communities.

Further exploration of these approaches leads to the final chapter of the project,

“PanAfrica Forever: Black Panther, Firedance , and Black Mecha’s AfroAsian/Afrofuturist

Challenge to the ‘World Color Line’" casts spotlight upon Firedance and Marvel Studios’ 2018

film Black Panther to recontextualize a reading of Barnes’s work. Whereas chapter five speaks to a reading of his SFF in terms of the Euro-American cyberpunk movement and, chapter four reorients the perspective in a Transpacific direction to interrogate the novels’ explicit engagements with East Asia, chapter six reads Firedance specifically as a text that manages to do both. My readings of Barnes’s canon heretofore have relied on the questions of somatic subjectivity, to be sure, but through the utility of AfroAsia as worldview I am able to not only parse the larger significance of Asian-derived martial arts as motif in his fiction, but also to probe the potentialities of the vexing kinds of Techno-Orientalism bound up in his brand of

Afrofuturism. A cynic might say that the reductivism of technophilic Japan (and China) was an

“occupational hazard” for those writing adjacent to the cyberpunk movement, and bespoke a pervasive (racially-coded) anxiety of a “Japan Panic” in the words of David Morley and Kevin

Roberts that served as undercurrent for a broad swath of 80s-era American pop culture (147); but here I want to dig deeper. Because it is clear that Barnes’s work is not simply about fetishizing

Asian alterity or fear of a Blade-Runner-esque fear of the Japanese economy, so much as it is about charting embodied histories of Transpacific connection across groups of arbitrarily separated groups of nonwhite peoples.

Embodied AfroAsian pasts make for a conceptual segue towards the futuristic potential of what I am calling the “Black Mecha.” Exploring what Barnes does in the utility of biomechanical augmentation and looking to Japanese pop cultural productions as reference points, and using Black Panther as a topical figuration of the same, I intend to stage a reading of

Barnes’s fiction as prefiguring a means of similarly grappling with the robotic/human somatic exegeses that Japanese writers and animators have been wrestling with since the 60s and 70s.

Staging an analysis of Barnes work at this crossroads of Afrofuturism-through-Black SFF and

AfroAsia as manifest through Black Mecha represents a meaningful methodological turn (though not explicitly a turn into its own sub-genre) in considering the Black body as yet another kind of reimagined historical and cultural text. It also allows for the reconsideration of his work in the

80s and 90s as potentially prefiguring a chartable course for subsequent Black SFF writers and visual storytellers towards the as-yet un-tapped potential of this kind of syncretic Black-Japanese approach to the recursive future bodies so emblematic of mecha as a genre.

CHAPTER 2

TO FLIP THE SCRIPT:

LION’S BLOOD , ALTERNATE HISTORY, AND NARRATIVES OF

COUNTERMEMORY IN THE CREATION OF SACETIMES FOR BLACK AMERICAN

BODIES

Strange, history. Complicated, too. It will always be a mystery, history. New disclosures are as bizarre as the most bizarre fantasy. Ishmael Reed The Flight to Canada

Introduction

Steven Barnes's 2002 alternate history novel, Lion's Blood, begins with a counterfactual premise that could easily be read as being so simplistic at face value as to perhaps beg the question as to why it had not been written previously: what if the color palette of American racial hierarchy was inverted during the antebellum moment? What if, in other words, the early days of the colonial

“new world” were marked by African domination and European chattel bondage?

The novel presents its sprawling chronicle of such a world in the context, not of an

Afrocentrist utopia, but of a violent and uncannily recognizeable racial politics of lordship and bondage. In these “New World” African colonial provinces of Bilalistan, readers meet the deuteragonists, Kai ibn Jallaleddin ibn Rashid and Aidan O’Dere. Kai is the younger son of a regional potentate, or Wakil, whose family exercises considerable authority within the Ethiopian colony of New Djibouti 8 from the manor estate, Dar Kush. Aidan, by contrast, is a son of a village

8 New Djibouti, along with the northern, Egyptian colony of New Alexandria, and several other holdings in the Mississippi river valley together make up Bilalistan, a loose association of provinces that occupy a territorial analogue of the eastern half of the United States. Named for Bilal, an African companion of the Prophet Muhammad (and guardian of his daughter Fatima), the semiautonomous region is one of uncomfortable similarity to the antebellum US South, substituting the fictional sect of Fatimite Islam for Christianity, and governed by a class of African-derived gentry.

headman in an Irish fishing crannog. He is kidnapped by vikings and sold at a market in Al Andalus

(Spain), before ultimately being separated from his sister when he and their mother are bought as bondspeople through a harrowing middle passage analogue to work on the Dar Kush plantation.

In spite of the narrative’s ultimate positioning of Kai and Aidan as would-be friends, it is this starkly hierarchal, irresistibly racializing circumstances manifest in the acts of purchasing and manipulating human bodies as property that serves as one of the central (and centrally troubling) parallel occurrences in this alternate history of the Western Hemisphere. Kai, for example, longs to be able to simply perceive Aidan as an individuated man and friend. But his family benefits immensely from the work done by their European bondspeople in aggregate, and they are able to enjoy the massive wealth brought forth as the fruits of the labor of enslaved bodies. Complicating this further is the fact that, in spite of this comparative privilege, Kai and the other Black characters in the novel repeatedly describe their lot as being artificially circumscribed by the litany of social obligations that they are compelled to uphold.

It is here, in the discrepancy between the perceptions of obligation experienced by Black characters, and the realities of bondage and slavery experienced by the white characters, that I locate the crux of what is at stake in readings of Lion’s Blood . Picking up on the assertions about the novel broached in the chapter on African American Science Fiction in Gene Andrew Jarrett’s

A Companion to African American Literature, I want to explore the way that “… Lion’s Blood disarticulates domination from whiteness and submission from Blackness, denaturalizing characteristics that racist discourse seeks to fix into racial signifieds” (373). But whereas Jarrett’s assertion of the fact is a brief one-sentence aside to address the novel as part of the larger traditions of SFF taking on the conventions of the neo-slave narrative, I hope to take the point a step or two further.

To evince my unpacking of this central conceit of semiotic uncoupling of this historical conflation of Black bodies with enslaved bodies in the context of an alternate transatlantic world,

I situate Lion’s Blood as a work within the SF genre of alternate history. Inasmuch as the novel is expressly marketed as such—“A Story of Slavery and Freedom in an Alternate America”—I structure my analysis of how such conventions provide a methodology to frame the novel’s imagined landscapes through utilizing history itself as narrative act. My readings of the text in this genre-specific light are accomplished through applications of Karen Hellekson’s scholarship in her monograph, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time .

However, in order to refine my reading of the Lion’s Blood , I propose looking beyond a superficial investigation of generic convention in the work as simply a text of alternate history. I add a reading of Eshun’s “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism” to pose the claim that, once unshackled from the initial conflation, the semiotic somatic of the Black (male) body can serve as historical counterfactual in and of itself. This counterfactual becomes more legible with the applications of Hortense Spillers’s American grammar. Her iconic parsing of the meanings of

“flesh” and “bodies” creates the context for my reading of Eshun’s considerations. Discussions of the Black body are made possible by the ways that “bodies” are sites of subjectivity. We might contrast this with the flesh of the “slave,” which, by law, custom, and ideology within the apparatus of white supremacy, is mere object. For the Black body, meaning comes when it becomes infused with “narrative,” or, in the context of my exploration of Lion’s Blood , with history

In building upon the narratives of Black bodies (as distinct from Black “flesh” as object),

I then discuss the novel’s engagement with the allegorical Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage. Barnes very consciously frames the novel’s narrative from the perspective of both Kai and Aidan as co-equal protagonists and—equally importantly for the structure and theming of the

text—as friends. And yet, the text emphatically discourages a facile solution to the issues of racial hegemony built on “power of friendship” platitudes and naively connotative “kumbaya” moments.

The work is structured around a series of epigraphic dialogues designed to tease out an ideology of mutual respect and acknowledgement. In doing so, it both echoes and corrects the narrative of

Hegel’s “lordship and bondage” allegory for the mutual recognition of “self-consciousness” found within Phenomenology of Spirit (111). In Barnes’s world of Bilalistan, to be recognized as an embodied subject is reciprocal, and though the journey to such recognition is fraught with the potentials of violence, the result is mutually liberating.

The current chapter is structured in such a way as to analyze Barnes’s novel from several different-but-interrelated perspectives. First, I follow up on the above discussion of the novel as a work of alternate history by situating it within that genre and its take on representing the historical ontologies of Blackness in American chattel slavery. Subsequently, I look into the Afrofuturistic capacity of alternate history as a genre, by assessing the question of what is at stake in postmodernist, SFF reinterpretation of the slave- and neo-slave narratives by suggesting that Black embodied subjectivity itself might serve as a kind of alternate history in such contexts. I then move into a rather sustained exercise in close reading to highlight specific and noteworthy instances of

Barnes’s use of bodies in Lion’s Blood to directly challenge various paradigms of understanding the role of Blackness in spacetime. I conclude with claims regarding the larger significance of

Barnes’s work with Black history, and the ways that this novel represents a literary apotheosis of themes gestured at elsewhere in his canon (which will themselves be unpacked in the following chapter).

Lion’s Blood and the Alternate History as Postmodern Slave Narrative Methodology

Lion's Blood, for all the temerariousness of its alternate history premise, is otherwise a novel that seems to be actively resisting easy categorization. In the wake of its publication, Barnes participated in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly about some of the more immediately apparent issues that might arise through the fictive working with such dark and volatile history. Describing the task of writing about slavery itself as the equivalent of “trying to sprint through a minefield,”

Barnes reiterates his personal description of himself as “at heart, I’m an adventure writer” (70).

This willingness to undertake the challenge of writing “controversial” fiction wrapped in the guise of an adventurous romp through an alternate past, is an approach a cynic might construe as perhaps problematic in the face of that history. Indeed, Jarret’s analysis speaks to precisely the novel’s potentiality for co-optation by slavery apologists, and with the contemporary popular discourse on

Black slavery in America lately being challenged by derailing exhortations of revisionist historiography regarding the stature of actual Irish indentured servants, reading the novel as mere

“adventure” may perhaps invite controversies of its own (70).

This is exactly why my own engagement with the novel seeks to dig deeper and highlight the specific points at stake in its rather unique position as a Black Atlantic speculative engagement with alternate history. I maintain that there is something unique in taking a historical counterfactual as narrative impetus, rather than deploying more fantastical elements of speculation in Lion’s

Blood . Their point of speculation derives from its engagement with antebellum society in toto and explore the ramifications of reworking historical time through the aftereffects of a different set of human efforts. As such, through a marshaling of “realistic” elements and the agential impact that such mundane interactions might have upon an outcome in historical records, the novel thus allows for a different sort of investigation of what exactly Blackness and Black bodies might mean on a

much more foundational level when the floating signifier of race is arbitrarily affixed to a different

kind of sign as a referential point.

Barnes's approach to world-building in Lion’s Blood is what Karen Hellekson identifies as

“true alternate history,” wherein through the actions within a self-contained timeline precipitate a divergence in historical time from the route it has taken in the extra-textual, “real world 9” (63). As such, the novel and its premise are presented as the result of the chance and outcomes of human agency and subjective perceptions of time within the narrative itself (as opposed, to use others of

Hellekson's examples, to extradimensional beings or time-travellers purposefully meddling with the outcomes at divergence points). In Lion’s Blood , the point of historical divergence hinges upon

Alexander the Great’s decision to consolidate his power in Egypt, which leads to a joint Egypto-

Carthaginan victory in the Second Punic War. The proverbial “butterfly effect” of this agential exercise of Alexander’s power is that North and East Africa becomes the global center of geopolitical dominance and cultural hegemony in the premodern world. Concordantly, Ethiopia and Egypt, rather than France and Britain, are the premier powers in the Transatlantic world, and to facilitate their mercantile authority, they import slave labor from the northern European hinterlands 10 (105).

9 For comparative purposes, Hellekson's reading of Philip K. Dick's novel, The Man in the High Castle , as another such work of “true” alternate history, becomes rather helpful. In both cases, readers are presented with inversion narratives (the Dick novel has the US losing WWII and being conquered by both Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire); but the works themselves likewise look to do more than just speculate on how such inversions of conqueror/conquered might play out, and instead look to posit larger questions regarding the nature of human interaction and the perceptions of temporality itself. 10 There are also works of scholarship on the novel that stage a critical assessment of the alternate religious dimensions of Bilalistani slavery as well. The presence of East African Islam as an undergirding aspect of hierarchy is unavoidable as a means of differentiating the masters from their Christian and Pantheistic slaves. Except, of course, when it is not. Juan F. Elice’s reading of the use of Islam and Sufism as a stand-in for Protestant/Catholic divide is one that, whilst an intriguing attempt at parsing the layers of defamiliarization that Barnes is constructing within the novel, is perhaps curiously silent upon the presence of the many non-Muslim Black folks in the narrative. The work suggests that there might be a rather facile, religious binarism at stake, but neglects to mention the potential tensions that occasionally cause friction, for example, between the Muslims of New Djibouti and the belief systems of the Zulus, with whom they form sustained and necessary political and financial ties.

What I find to be most useful, among Hellekson's brand of inquiry regarding alternate history as genre, methodology, and convention, is the ways in which her reading of it necessitates a critical investigation of the nature of repetition in time (65). Though she uses a model more overtly beholden to a reading of Heidegger, her understanding of the translations of his concept of

“repetition” is almost a verbatim description of the concept—Sankofa, which hinges upon a notion of “going back to fetch something” (26). And this notion of a refigured recursive time, which itself is beholden to the genre of alternate history's requisite work with the play between remembered historical time and a larger, less subjective “arrow of time,” stands as foundational to her readings of this genre of fiction in such a way that I likewise find meaningful when applied to Barnes's novel.

Lion's Blood , at its heart, is an exercise in challenging memory and its relationship to time and specific segments of historiography. The relationship between the novel's deuteragonists, Kai and Aiden, plays with recollections of antebellum slavocracy in a host of different ways. I would contend, foundationally, that Barnes's text's questions are rather immediate in their articulation: just what was chattel slavery, and how did it impact the lives and bodies of the men and women it touched?

To provide its answers to those questions, Lion’s Blood, as a work of alternate history that treats themes of pertinence to Afrodiasporic historiography (and the experiences of

American chattel slavery in particular), represents a nexus that links that more generalized SF sub-genre with Postmodern Narratives of Slavery. And yet, it is not exactly singular in its existence at that nexus. Alternate history is actually replete with examples of texts that focus on alternative outcomes of the American Civil War and by necessary extension, must treat the ramifications of the Confederate States of America as a persistent slaveocracy. Texts by authors

such as Harry Turtledove (1992’s The Guns of the South and 1997’s How Few Remain ) and

Ward Moore ( Bring the Jubilee, 1953) create worlds of difference that nonetheless consistently reveal the intractability and tragedy of the “peculiar institution’s” manifest white supremacy across a multiverse of alternate histories. These novels’ preoccupation with the war itself compares readily with the manifold manifestations of state sanctioned violences against the

Black bodies caught in the apparatus of Southern nationalism.

Such nightmare scenarios—quite dystopian in their ramifications and implications for the

Black characters who populate them—create spaces for extrapolative explorations of what

Blackness might mean in a nineteenth and twentieth century of American history without universal emancipation as it occurred in our timeline. Other novels—such as Ben H. Winters’s

Underground Airlines (2016), and Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain (1988)—wrestle with the reverberations of different approaches to the issue of slavery that sidestep the actual Civil

War, and both carry their respective premises far into the future from the point of divergence.

Winters’s novel is grim in its depiction of a twenty-first century America where “persons bound to labor” continue to be enslaved in four states after nearly two hundred years of attempting to

“compromise” the issue away. Bisson’s on the other hand, takes a dramatically more utopian outlook in speculating the existence of an independent Black Republic of Nova Africa in the aftermath of John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s successful raid on Harper’s Ferry.

Alternate history works by Black American authors, however, are rather sparse on the ground, even in spite of the genre’s relative popular appeal. Lion’s Blood was something of a standout entry in light of its authorship until fairly recently. It has been joined by Nisi Shawl’s

2016 novel, Everfair , which posits a timeline in which the Congo Free State was partially purchased and partially won by force-of-arms from King Leopold by Black American

missionaries and European Socialists. The independent republic becomes a socially progressive, technocratic steampunk powerhouse.

Steampunk, as a means of reimagining the late nineteenth century that is conceptually adjacent to alternate history, is increasingly proving to be a fertile site for imagining Black pasts.

In 2013, an anthology edited by Black SFF authors Milton Davis and Balogun Ojetade, entitled

Steamfunk! , offered a structured way of framing Black engagement with the conventions of the genre. In the introduction, Ojetade 11 reflects on the dissatisfaction that African and African

American authors had with the ways that “most Steampunk ignored the ‘darker’ aspects of the

Victorian Era, such as colonialism, sexism, classism, racism and chattel slavery” (7). As such, the short fiction in the anthology forces the conventions of the genre they signify upon to confront exactly those sorts of latent strands of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy within

Anglo-American texts. This is done through anachronistic instances of technology, yes, but also through the centering of Black and female bodies within the narratives.

In both steamfunk texts and Black alternate history, again, as ever, it is the body that becomes the site of powerful discursive engagement with the past. Shawl’s novel and the

Steamfunk! stories do not necessarily approach the ontogenesis of Blackness as separate and apart from bondage in quite the same way that Lion’s Blood does, insofar as they are wrestling with different ideas. But in a way that foreshadows my subsequent engagement with cyberpunk texts in later chapters of this dissertation, they ask questions about the body as a scarred site that might be made whole again through technological prostheses. In Everfair , many of the victims of

Leopold’s hellish regime in the “Free State” are those who have been dismembered by his agents

11 Ojetade himself is also the author of the novel, Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman . Herein, Tubman is a super-powered fighter who must confront a cabal of 1865’s rankest rogues, inclusive of actual historical figures like John Wilkes Booth, Louis Pasteur. All this in a fantastic world of monsters, machines, and metahumans.

and overseers of the rubber plantations. To counter this fact of colonial and white supremacist violence upon the bodies of Black folks, the people of Shawl’s alternate history devise steam- powered clockwork prostheses to empower the formerly victimized population. The imagined counterfactual historical scenario here (and we see similar work with such SF tropes in the anthology) suggests that palliative and convalescent technologies might serve the purposes of healing Black bodies 12 .

While Winters’s Underground Airlines and Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain both likewise tell the stories of slaves who exist in alternate historical timelines, Lion’s Blood distinguishes itself from those two novels in its layered historical engagement with diasporic Blackness.

Underground Airlines , in spite of the controversy its July 2016 review in the New York Times evinced in some rather tone-deaf claims of the “brave” act Winters was undertaking to “mix slavery and sci-fi” (as though Octavia Butler had not beaten him to that punch by nearly three decades with Kindred ), is instructive in its approach to reading Black bodies’ responses to the twenty-first century slavery of its alternate historical landscape (Alter, “In his new novel…”).

The novel presents a curious sort of work with the institution of slavery in that it seems to paradoxically showcase the American pathology, whilst simultaneously silencing the history that surrounds it. Presenting epistemic and physiological harm done to the Black bodies that populate its world, Underground Airlines seems content to let them be foundationally ahistorical entities.

And even though the narrator is himself Black (a Black slave-catcher no less), the novel presents a world wherein the larger Black population is lacking in agency; that they are made by history,

12 Allegorical readings of the futuristic treatments of re-membering what was both dismembered, and—in a very real sense—forgotten, will have considerable import later in this dissertation as well. But for the present conversation about its relevance to the work in alternate history, it remains a helpful means of considering what is at stake in the kind of rendering of the somatic that Lion’s Blood itself is attempting to engage with. In order to do so, I propose to temporarily table the discussion of bodily augmentation of a sort seen in steam- and cyberpunk fictions, and to shift the generic gaze towards the ontology and phenomenology of slavery itself, and the ways that the experiences of bondage might be narrated.

unclear] and nowhere in the text, not even in the eponymous update on the historical underground railroad, are Black bodies makers of history. They exist fully as instances of commodity and objects of labor, a point that reaches its apotheosis in the revelation that the slaveholding states are participating in bioengineering experiments to clone Black bodies to maximize their ability to produce labor.

Such an approach lacks the nuance of Barnes’s attempts to find humanity in the vertiginous rendering of American racial politics. Winters’s novel creates a solid century and a half gulf of utter silence regarding progression of Black culture and identity, deigning only to hand-wave the bizarrely decontextualized presences of Martin Luther King Jr., and Michael

Jackson (193). The novel seems unsure of what to do with the historical slavery that it purports to be intellectually engaging with, beyond using it as a mechanic to stage commentary about what it (perhaps) proposes to utilize as an analogous circumstance in the form of dehumanizing corporate labor. The Blackness of the bodies in question and the uniqueness of American history’s relationship with chattel slavery are functionally incidental to the discourse on bodies, period.

By contrast, Bisson’s vision of Nova Africa is somewhat closer in line to what Barnes is able to accomplish. It is true that the narrative present is likewise some hundred-plus years socially and culturally removed from the historical divergence point. And it is likewise true that, in spite of the novel’s representation of an ostensibly utopian Pan-Africanism, the explanations for the present state of international affairs is largely relegated to elliptical revelations in expositional dumps. But Fire on the Mountain ’s Afrodiasporic engagement is one that is a layered reading of history that is much more directly relevant to the sarkaesthetics of Black bodies as being marked by history through representations of generational legacy. In spite of

Nova Africa’s representation as a spacefaring, socialist technocracy, the legacies of slavery are felt and commemorated in the relationship between the narrative present and the immediate moments of the revolutionary acts of historical divergence.

Black bodies in Fire on the Mountain (and, as I will demonstrate, in Lion’s Blood too), are in the vein of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past , not only narrators of the fictive texts’ exercise in historical imagination, but they also serve as actors within it (2). It is precisely the texts’ work in creating contiguity between multiple culturally-specific historiographies, that allows us to begin to parse its rendering of Black peoples as agents, actors, and subjects in this counterfactual narrative. Black bodies and Black manifestations of embodied subjectivity in

Bisson and Barnes are allowed to make history in both implicit valences of the expression 13 .

These bodies participate in historical actions and enact the instances of narrative utterance that record these incidents as being of historical significance. Here, the scars of violent self-liberation are legible and intelligible as moves by Black bodies with agency, with the strength and means to forge their own paths in repudiation or indifference to the metatextual exigencies of institutional white supremacy.

Moreover, they do so in ways that cause the reader of these speculative texts to reconsider the actual historical circumstances that the novels’ statuses as works of alternate history are defamiliarizing. Rather than simply forcing further considerations on slavery (which

Fire on the Mountain , Lion’s Blood , and even Underground Airlines certainly do), the defamiliarizing approaches Bisson and Barnes’s texts use, serve to “un-silence” the actual historical circumstances surrounding the important roles of the bodies of People of Color in the

13 It is, perhaps, something of a productive coincidence that both Trouillot and Barnes find merit in respective interrogations of the the Battle of the Alamo as a site of comparative silences of historiographical and national- memory-related sorts.

Harper’s Ferry Raid and in the Mexican-American War. These novels use the imaginative capacity of speculative fiction to actively stage exercises in imaginative historiography that serve to unseat the prevailing narratives about the role that Black/enslaved people played in pivotal moments in American social and military history.

Fitting Lion’s Blood into the larger body of alternate history fiction by exploring its treatment of alternate forms of slavery leads to further concerns regarding genre and the impact that this has on the text’s figurations of Black somatics. Indeed, as mentioned above, the conceit at the heart of the novel is one of racial inversion. While we have seen the ways that play with the various factors of historical timelines can raise productive points about the nature of agency and the abilities to make history (which dovetails with “true alternate history’s” general aversion for engaging the supernatural in favor of exploring the human impacts on such timelines), Lion’s

Blood , in particular expects the reader to be able to take as already given the humanity of Black people.] While Winters’s novel wrestles with this basic assumption and raises it as a centering question in his alternate history, Bisson is surer of the foundational principle, seeing that humanity as a recognition hard won from the hands of an oppressive regime. Barnes, however, through

Lion’s Blood’ s ironic deconstructive investigation of Blackness itself positions the work to ask a host of other questions about embodied identity in historical counterfactuals than either of its fellow texts can do.

(Afro)Future History: Lion’s Blood , Narratives, and the Chronopolitics of Countermemory

Barnes engages the silences surrounding his histories that are structural in nature and bespeak certain malingering palls cast upon the landscape of Euro-American historiography. Both

Trouillot and Eshun speak to the ways that these master(s’) narratives work to render the subjective and somatic experiences of Black bodies as outside the collective scope of “history” as understood

as a product of certain strands of European-derived ideologies (17 and 228, respectively). The projects of the Enlightenment and other contemporary and preceding philosophical movements created a kind of history that willfully avoids and obfuscates the place of the peoples of the African

Diaspora. Black SFF novels, that participate in alternate history conventions like Lion’s Blood , stand as ideally placed to wrest the gag off of these problematical silences, and create space for truly alternat ive histories.

I find it helpful to pause here and highlight Hegel as one of the “usual suspects,” whose sticky historiographical and ideological approaches Lion’s Blood engages. For all that his writings on phenomenology and historical idealism might represent within the canonical body of writings on what exactly “history” means, and its manifestations and movements across space and time, the doggedly persistent fact remains that elements of white supremacist patriarchy infect and inform some of his most persistent philosophical pronouncements. There is, of course, the vexed and vexing construction of his lordship and bondage (“master-slave”) dialectic, formulated concomitantly with the landmark event of the Haitian Revolution as is highlighted in Susan Buck-

Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History . And likewise, the much quoted and much maligned utterances of a progression of history itself that bypasses the whole continent of Africa as Eshun himself points out in “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” (288).

Hegel’s presumption that the whole continent of Africa, is “no historical part of the world,” helps to actuate the issues at stake in Lion’s Blood ’s alternate history methodology (Hegel The

Philosophy of History 117). That Hegel might have, in the eighteenth century, made such a lasting and thoroughly wrongheaded assertion about the nature of “history” and whom might be said to possess it, and go so long unchallenged in this historiographical claim, would be reason enough to attempt to unpack its significance, as, indeed, so many scholars have.

From a methodological standpoint, Kodwo Eshun provides a foundation to begin to read against such problematic master(s’) narratives of history that stems from the framework of

Afrofuturism: that of chronopolitics. Articulated in his “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,”

Eshun’s framework sees time itself as a site of politicized contest as part of a historically recursive loop (289). Not only is the future a space for imagining liberation and systematic pushback against the politics of exclusion and marginalization that define the present moment’s rendering of white supremacist patriarchy, as the visible semantics of Afrofuturism would suggest, but so too is the past. In reimagining and remembering the past as such—to say nothing of acknowledging and understanding its role relative to the epiphenomena of the “present”—it is possible to stage meaningful critical interventions into the way history itself functions. The past is politicized, and marshaled for the sake of unseating precisely the kinds of problematically determinist misunderstandings of “history” as born from the Hegelian “Original Sin” of excluding an entire continent’s worth of peoples, places, and epistemologies.

Such an approach, which Eshun defines as “countermemory,” has tremendous potential relevance to the reconstruction of narratives of Afrodiasporic peoples (287-88). It allows for the construction of alternate subjectivities in counter-position to Eurocentric models without necessarily falling into the pitfalls of the Pan-Africanists’ re-articulations of the same kinds of

“Imagined Communities” that undergird the problematic articulations of nationalism as ideology.

Rather than investing in the tautological negations of nationalism against nationalism, countermemory within Afrofuturist texts allows for creative and meaningful application of memory and imagination serve to offer distinct modes of critical discourse. Modes that are all the more necessary in light of the connections that can exist between history itself and narrative.

To say that the two processes—historical recounting and narrative-crafting—are interrelated is to perhaps belabor a point at least as old as Herodotus and Thucydides. But to refigure historical time, and to construct countermemories through literary revisitations of instances, moments, and periods as part of a project of actively unseating master narratives, are, perhaps more recent phenomena. One such way of doing so is to seek to actively re-inhabit the pasts of people written into the margins of history. In so doing, writers of counter-histories and historical fictions can forcibly make the move to center what hegemonic historiographies have engineered as absences. A chronopolitics of re-focusing the views of the past with a broader lens allowed for writers as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois ( Black Reconstruction ), Alice Walker ( The

Color Purple ), and Toni Morrison ( Beloved ) to intervene into American myopic

“misremembrances” of history. These writers’ approaches obliterate facile mythologies of the

American nation-state, by wrenching subjectivity away from the parochial purview of white supremacist patriarchy, and making space for the intersectional subjectivities of Black men and women.

Much scholarly discussion has been staged on Morrison’s intervention here in particular, and Beloved stands tall among other twentieth century works that participate in that kind of chronopolitical engagement with slavery in the American past. The work on neo-slave narratives by Ashraf Rushdy and others offers meaningful insight into Beloved ’s (and Dessa Rose ’s, and

Flight to Canada ’s, and Oxherding Tale ’s, among others) projects of creating historical and subjective spaces for the discussion of not just slavery, but of slaves as autonomous and agential individuals. These novels demonstrate an awareness of both extant bodies of scholarship about the institution of chattel bondage in the Transatlantic world, and of the narratives and experiences as transcribed by former bondspeople themselves. Re-embodying this psycho-social space from the

vantage point of a century’s worth of retrospection demonstrates precisely the kind of abjection

Black bodies and minds were read as within the canonical recounting of a tacitly (and intrinsically) politicized, hegemonic historiography.

Such points are helpful to reiterate here. Neo-slave narratives are part of a necessary and constant (perhaps even Sisyphean) struggle to force acknowledgement of individual Black bodies and minds within the histories of America. But Beloved in particular begins an engrossing conversation about such an approach, as it stages its conversation about slavery and American atrocity through an employment of speculative elements. That there is something more to this narrative of slavery that bespeaks either the fantastic and/or a distinctive epistemological framework than the autobiographical recounting of actual narratives of slavery. I am particularly fascinated in the concept that emerges from Beloved of “Rememory,” and see it dovetailing helpfully with the hitherto described points of countermemory and refiguring historical time (36).

Initially expressed by Morrison’s character, Sethe, “rememory” posits a localized psychical connection with a specific event within spacetime; a rememory is simultaneously a reconnection across an event-horizon of space and time that continuously reverberates with the pain of a traumatic event. The trauma itself becomes an epiphenomenon, situated within both objective spacetime—in this case, Sweet Home Plantation prior to emancipation—and the subjective experiences there and then.

Relative to the alternate history of Barnes's Lion’s Blood , then, it seems that the North

American continent writ-large is a metatextual and ironical site of the “rememory” of chattel slavery. The iconography and geography of his counterfactual world-building is overdetermined already by the very nature of its project: the tagline for the text, “a novel of slavery and freedom in an alternate America,” gains meaning from the fact that we can recall and are informed by the

actual American history of bondage and freedom existing cheek-by-jowl in the antebellum moment. The America that exists in the collective metatextual rememory of Barnes’s readership is every bit as marked by the historical trauma of chattel slavery as the microcosm of Sweet Home

Plantation. So his novel’s project, in guiding his readers through the alternate history’s counterfactual exercise, is contingent upon how those memories “bump into” people, and force an engagement with the past he is defamiliarizing.

Inasmuch as this metatextual rememory is actively engaging with American chattel slavery, Lion’s Blood clearly invests itself in the conventions of neo-slave narratives at least as much as it does with those of alternate history. Such analysis, pulling from Rushdy and Bernard

Bell’s framing of neo-slave/neoslave narratives, as well as the broader conceptual framework of the “contemporary narratives of slavery,” offered by Arlene R. Keizer, proffers helpful addenda to the alternate history methodologies by which Barnes’s novel presents the conceptual landscape of a twenty-first century work inhabiting the bodies and minds of nineteenth century bondspeople (3).

Beginning with Aidan’s kidnapping from his Irish village, and continuing on through depictions of whippings, attempted self-liberation, slave insurrection, and, ultimately, war against an external aggressor, Lion’s Blood hits many of the same thematic beats of other neo- slave narratives. Taking cues from, and indeed directly signifying upon, antecedent works in the canon of Black Atlantic Literature—with visible send-ups to elements of the narratives of

Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass—Barnes's work imagines and investigates how such an inversion might make itself manifest by chronicling the abduction of

Aiden O'Dere, a white man living in Ireland. Framing the kidnapping as a kind of internecine, white-on-white violence, Barnes's work in highlighting the Viking raiders as co-racial

conspirators in the mass theft of humans from their homelands for the financial gains and predations of imperial expansionists serves to directly evoke the iconography and narrative beats of Equiano's narrative. The difference, of course, is that the image is seen through its racializing negative.

In signifyin(g) thusly—on Equiano's narrative, and all such texts that highlight the horrors of the middle passage (33)—Lion's Blood is engaging in important postmodern work in refiguring the very concept of what a slave narrative, or indeed, a neo -slave narrative, might be. I posit that the work here, in its dalliance with imagined subjectivities of bondspeople is indeed doing work of a comparable sort to the neo-slave narratives that stand before it within the chronology of the canon. Yet, in contrast to what we might identify as more traditional neo-slave narratives, Lion's

Blood enacts the work of historical narrative construction and formulation of individual subjectivity through the methodological tropes and conventions of alternate history. To this end, it might well be understood to be pulling double-duty: representing the actualities of chattel slavery's historical excesses and tragedies, but by enacting them upon white bodies, rather than

Black ones, Barnes's work encourages the reader to interrogate the nature of what this sort of bondage might really mean .

That said, in staging such a distinct cross-genre approach, Lion’s Blood demonstrates that to read the novel solely as a particularly imaginative neo-slave narrative/“contemporary narrative of slavery,” misses an opportunity to unpack the ways in which the distinctly Afrofuturist elements are expressed in its narrative construction. So when neo-slavery does not quite push the conceptual envelope far enough, we turn to a methodological framework proffered by Isaiah

Lavender in Race in American Science Fiction : the meta-slave narrative (55).

Narratives of Meta-Slavery are works of twentieth century fiction that add an element of the speculative to the efforts to re-inhabit the psychological and social spaces of chattel bondage as historically experienced in the Transatlantic world. These works themselves can and do overlap with the body of related works, neo-slave narratives, which are also twentieth century texts about exploring and remembering the traumatic moments of African and African American bondage in colonial and Antebellum America. But whereas neo-slave narratives undertake this process within fictive realities largely bounded and circumscribed by historical realities, narratives of Meta-

Slavery, as their name suggests, engage in methods of storytelling that provide an element of the fantastic to go beyond simply re-living the existential horrors of pre-Emancipation Black life.

Lavender provides insights into Octavia Butler’s Kindred as a work of this kind of meta- slavery, and suggests that her Xenogenesis books might likewise be read in such a way as well

(63). The former creates a narrative experience of literally re-inhabiting Black life on the plantation by having its protagonist time-travel back and forth between 1976 and various points in the early nineteenth century. The latter novels, however, go a step farther by more thoroughly abstracting the concept of slavery itself and rendering it into a radically defamiliarized futuristic space of interplanetary and interspecies hierarchy. Lavender claims that these approaches to reimagining slavery in the language and practice of such speculative and fantastic tropes of time-travel and extraterrestrial encounters allows for SF interpretations of chattel slavery to ask precisely the sort of questions grounded in the presumptive permanence of racism and the ubiquity of its manifestations relative to hierarchal motifs of domination and subjugation (veiled within the language of symbiosis in Butler’s case).

But is the construction of an entirely different historical context itself grounds for reading texts like Lion’s Blood as meta-slavery works? Lavender would seem to agree, not least because

Race in American Science Fiction itself dedicates a part of a chapter to Barnes’s Insh’allah books

(80-87). My own reading of the novels has me inclined to make a similar supposition, and take steps further: methodologically speaking, a work of Afrofuturist alternate history would stand to be quite thoroughly in-line with the projects of meta-slavery narratives. The chronopolitics of reestablishing a space for Blackness to exist within a realm of speculative defamiliarization blends the aims of reconceptualizing the Transatlantic World with constructed and extrapolated historical counterfactuals. Here, the very act of redefining historical time itself becomes the “meta-” in these narratives of slavery.

But equally important here is the fact that Barnes’s novel deals at least as much with the individual slaves as it does with the social manifestation of slavery , whether meta-, neo-, or otherwise. Insomuch as the text allows for the kind of particularity of experiences of its deuteragonists, we see the confluence of embodied and social ramifications of bondage on both sides of the color line.

“Un-Mastering the Narrative”: Figuring and Refiguring Narratives of Bondage in Alternate History Texts

At the core of this reading of the Black body in alternate history novels is the role of these kinds of bodies themselves as texts. That these bodies serve as the mode of articulation and narration of historical trauma, tradition, and temporality is vital to this particular reading. Because, as I frankly contend here, Black bodies can and do form a foundation for a somatic rendering of the countermemory Eshun proposes: these bodies attest, collectively, to a narrative of resistance and resilience that stands in open defiance of the epistemological violence that white supremacists histories attempt to assert. In an hegemonic history that is predicated on practices of eliding, obfuscating, and silencing Black folks, it stands to reason, then, that the persistence of Black bodies

themselves might well be understood as an exercise in counterfactual: what if, master narratives of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy notwithstanding, we survived anyway?

And I would go a step further here also, running with the conceptual tool of embodied countermemory. Carol E. Henderson’s eponymous notion in her monograph, Scarring the Black

Body does much to express a significance for reading the metaphor of the scar as a somatic language for narrating traumas visited upon Black folks, in both actual slave narratives and in their twentieth century descendants, the neo-slave narratives. In looking at the way that scars serve as a method of somatic historiography, Henderson reads the literary manifestations and representations of those scars as a language of call and response, signifying back and forth between narratives by

(former) slaves and narratives about slaves. In this context, the antiphony of harm and healing, of trauma and (re-)memory, serves as ordering element for stories about and through bodies (7).

Henderson’s approaches to somatic history is all the more significant in relation to the projects inherent in these alternate history novels’ work in uncoupling the readily conflated presences of the Black body with the enslaved body in Afrodiasporic and African American literary canon. Barnes’s Lion’s Blood becomes significant for precisely this reason. His rendering of the Black body as not merely scarred itself, but as capable of inflicting scars is one that offers a uniquely nuanced articulation of the American historical landscape. Lion’s Blood’s most arresting depiction of this kind of violence in action is the way that the bodies of white slaves are brutalized in the aftermath of a failed insurrection: as a result of both staging a false conversion to Islam and attempting to use the privileges afforded to Muslim bandspeople to get close enough to the big house to take the lives of several Black people, the Wakil’s eldest son, Ali has the ringleaders beaten and crucified at the edges of the slave cabins (333). Their bodies are left to decompose there

as visual reminders (body-sized scars on the community) of the violence inherent in New

Djibouti’s slave system.

The nature of this kind of violence is indicative of the deeper meaning of Barnes’s novel, as such actions within the narrative are heavily reliant upon thematic and historical irony as part of the nature of the power inversion. As with many alternate history novels, we read the text not merely to explore and imagine the counterfactual, but to engage with the ways in which it highlights and focuses in on critical aspects of both historical time and contemporary social issues.

The exercise is one in which the author might readily image a fundamentally different reality brought about by the historical divergence; but the novel works and attempts to provide pleasure and/or intellectual stimulation for the reader by staging inversions of known and understood

(perhaps even, insidiously, reified) historical instances. To this end, the fact of imagining a world wherein Irish and Frankish peoples are subjected to the same kinds of humiliating and dehumanizing practices as Igbo and Fulani is a meaningful staging of an ironic parallelism. As readers, the scenes of capture, resistance, punishment, and liberation as experienced by the white characters in the novel take on additional weight of significance precisely because we understand that these selfsame institutional depravities were enacted by whites upon Black folk in American history. Such re-inscription of scars on the bodies of the enslaved do much to make the novel work as a fictive recounting of oppressive acts.

The discussion of the Black somatic is helpfully and philosophically unpacked vis-à-vis an historicized American context circa 1974, in Charles Johnson’s “A Phenomenology of the Black

Body.” Signifying on works as disparate as Eldridge Cleaver, Frantz Fanon, Hegel, and Husserl,

Johnson gestures towards an understanding of Black body image as part of a larger noesis-nouem articulation of subjectivity (110). In so doing, he posits an understanding of the Black somatic

experience as one marked—“stained”—indelibly by its historical position in dialogue with whiteness. To the point that Black subjectivity as a whole, is always-already understood solely in relation to the implicit power dynamics of American racial hierarchy.

Barnes's novel suggests a similar effect, albeit through its inherently ironic juxtaposition of Bilalistani and American society. Metatextually, the Lion’s Blood must be confronted upon the terms of extant historical realities and circumstances. That said, any and all attempts to render a Black planter aristocracy exists directly and specifically as a “mirror, darkly” through which white American analogues might be seen and understood. At the end of the day, then,

Lion’s Blood potentially presents a presupposition of a kind of equal and opposite manifestation of somatic encoding of racial difference.

One might well expect as much from Barnes as an author, as he has taken positionalities elsewhere in his fiction and nonfiction to the effect that there is a kind of innately “human” and

“universal” capacity for violence, harm, and cruelty. This, in contrast with a similar ideological presupposition that the ability to be good and just is likewise not the sole province of any one racial or ethnic group (183). In a 2008 essay on race and representation in American cinema,

Barnes writes:

It’s easy to look at some phenomenon of human behavior—especially a negative one— and simply take the position that the perpetrators are knaves or fools. The more difficult response is to ask: What universal behaviors, what simple principles of human behavior, might, in emergent form, lead to complex and sometimes unpleasant results? What explanation helps me to understand humanity better? In other words, the question: Where am I in the issue of the behavior that I abhor? Whether correct or not, it is valuable to look at things this way (183).

The above commentary on a kind of “universality” of human capacity for goodness and wickedness, is, of course, a rather pedestrian notion when read most abstractly. The assertion is made a bit more concrete though, by the fact that Barnes, in Lion’s Blood, has quite clearly done

his homework on the ways that slavery was utilized within Islamic societies in Africa to add another layer of realism to his implication of the potential brutality of this sort of chattel domination. If anything, the crux of the novel’s engagement with slavery as an institution seems to be that it has the capacity to corrupt anyone who would build their society upon it.

As such, the novel could easily stray into the realm of ideological and philosophical abstraction in a manner akin to Johnson’s own contemporary narrative of slavery, Oxherding Tale .

And indeed, the texts do work reasonably well in comparison with one another (not least because of their curiously parallel scenes of master and slave getting drunk together and sharing an intimate moment of homosocial bonding) (Johnson 5; Barnes 150). Barnes and Johnson both demonstrate a curiosity with the ontological underpinnings and conceptual slipperiness of just what “slavery” itself might mean. But if Oxherding Tale skews more readily in the direction of unpacking the psychological and existential dimensions of bondage, to that Lion’s Blood adds a much more readily palpable sense of understanding what bondage does not merely to mind and spirit, but to body as well.

Understanding just what exactly Barnes does with Black bodies in Lion’s Blood is a matter of aesthetic, social, and narrative layering. All of which is perhaps made the more opaque through the deployment of the irony of the novel’s central inversion of racial formation. But bracketing such aspects for the moment, at a foundational level, the project of the novel seems to harken most readily to the schema of Eldridge Cleaver’s Supermasculine Menial/Omnipotent

Administrator construction (208). Here, rather than affixing Blackness solely to the menial condition of physical labor, and whiteness as reducible solely to mental tasks, the novel explores the intersectional ways that the bodies in question are marked and defined by their roles within the alternate history being conveyed. In regards to Kai in particular, the disparate iconographies

of Blackness, maleness, and Black maleness stand as reflections of the various strands of identity that layer text and context. Whereas the historical permutations of Black maleness that have been extant in the American literary canon have skewed in the direction of a bound somatic sublime

(that Black bodies might be made to/for labor and, moreover, be somehow “suited” for manual tasks has origins in the pseudosciences that inflected paradigms of racial domination), and paradoxically, post-Emancipation, be content with a lifestyle of whimsy and indolence, is discursive ground that has been well-tread per the analyses of Black bodies in white prose.

In Barnes’s novel, we see two important manifest refutations of this paradigm. Both of them are derived from the reader's cognitive estrangement (and concomitant presumed rememory of the actual histories and conventions of the American Antebellum Slavocracy) that the plantations of Bilalistan represent. The first of these is the creation of a scholarly, erudite class of

Black men who serve as the ruling class of the plantations, of which Kai is being groomed to be a part. Through the repeated depictions of his varying sorts of tutelage under the elders of the estate, we see the privileging of intellectualism within the rendering of Kai's life. Through this kind of education, he learns of the philosophical underpinnings of Bilalistan's religion, history, and other manifestations of particular colonial culture. Both Kai and his elder brother Ali are depicted as voracious learners, and those who do not hesitate to volunteer their understanding of the social mechanics whenever the situations arise. The characterization here seems to signify the creation of a class of Black omnipotent administrators.

But that recoding is undermined by the second, interrelated, manifest refutation of the paradigmatic representation of stereotypical Black bodies as solely the machines of physical labor.

Here though, we see Barnes staging less a categorical negation of the conflation of Blackness and flesh, so much as a complication and reorientation of the nature of intellect and “embodiedness.”

In the novel, Kai and Ali's training to take on the mantel of domination and lineage perpetuation for their estate is likewise predicated on the fact that masculinity, Blackness, and aristocratic bearing are all lumped directly into their training to balance body and mind/spirit. As such, I contend that Bilalistani Black masculinity is not defined by the gap that Cleaver’s iconography of the “omnipotent administrator” finds in American whiteness, which he describes as having mortgaged its access to the body in favor of mastery of all minds within the gendered and racial schema.

Moreover, Barnes’s rendering of Bilalistani slavery stand as perhaps not so cataclysmically abject in its depiction of forfeiture of psychical access. Rather than build upon an analogue to white supremacy’s elevation of mental labor above somatic labor, as in liberal humanism’s Cartesian dualism, the novel poses instances of interaction between Black masters and white bondspeople that (whether intentionally or not) presume at least a modicum of sentience and subjectivity on the disempowered side of the color line. Of course, to do too much in terms of creating a space of valuation of the bondspeople’s intellect would disrupt the irony at the heart of the alternate history conceit, so the novel does not go so far as to present, for example, schools or institutional commitments to literacy for the whites. However, the implicit assumption of the system in place at Dar Kush is that Aidan and other whites are expected to comport themselves with a modicum of honor in the use of bodies and minds. And they are expected to communicate in Arabic.

This last, while it is important in the novel’s earlier work in highlighting young Aidan’s alienation within this alternate Transatlantic World, becomes increasingly more a part of the background as the plot unfolds. There are, as Elices points out, moments within the narrative that call attention to the difficulties of acculturation for the Irish population of Dar Kush. The novel

does occasionally bring attention to the white characters’ “thick accents,” for example, and address the significance of Arabic words, as Elices notes, “don’t fit into [their] mouths” (Elices 43-4).

In its early pages, Lion’s Blood makes space to remark upon language and literacy in a manner not unlike how other (neo-)slave narratives do in their own renderings of middle passage displacement (Barnes 29, 33). In this case, however, the meta-slavery abuts the alternate history and must address the issue of “privilege” afforded to white characters with some literacy. Even the basic ability to write one’s name in Gaelic is the difference between service in the Mediterranean world and transport to the plantations of Bilalistan. This very conceptualization and overt demarcation of valuation in literacy suggests a profound difference between the alternate history’s

Egypto-Abyssinian bondage and the Euro-American form practiced in the historical Transatlantic

World. This instance of Barnes’s world-building may thus read as confounding to the larger endeavor of reflecting a chromatic-negative of white supremacy through simple inversion of the denial of agency through attendant denial of agency.

And in reading the novel as a meta-slave narrative, the question of literacy is one of the most conspicuous absences in all of Barnes’s work in Lion’s Blood . Beyond those initial discussions of the varied tongues of the Irish, Vikings, Moors and others in the Transatlantic

World, we see surprisingly little energy expended in the representations of Aidan’s acquaintance and faculty in learning Arabic. Later in the text he can certainly speak it, and the narrative suggests that he can read it. But in contrast to the “talking book” agonies of Black bondspeople in American history time, Lion’s Blood offers no analogue (Gates 131).

Instead, the concern is placed on what might be identified as somatic literacies, seen in fisticuffs and swordplay. In a world of domination wherein every act of racial hierarchy is intrinsically predicated upon physical and epistemic violence, here Aidan has been tutored to speak

back to power in a language it understands. That the latent violence of the slavocracy itself is complemented by a warrior aristocracy’s overt language of violence, to master the martial arts is, very explicitly, to demonstrate one’s social humanity (even if only proximally). In an early description of Aidan’s attempts to emulate Kai’s somatic declaratives, Barnes writes:

Kai rather liked what he saw. Aiden had learned more by just watching (through a grille? Through a crack in the door?) than did some of his uncle’s students did in the actual presence of the Master. “Not bad,” he allowed. Aidan mimed a salute, his hand to his heart. “Yes sir!” he said. Kai grinned. Just like a little monkey, Aidan was. Kai lay back against the grain bags, resting his sore muscles. Indeed, he had made a good choice of footboys. This was going to be fun. (85-86)

Earlier in the chapter, Kai muses about Aidan’s intellect as seen through the boy’s quick ability to pick up Arabic words (80). But the passage above emphasizes the fact that it is the attempts on

Aidan’s part to emulate the language of violence being taught to Kai by his uncle mark the white youth that truly mark him as an exceptionally “fun” and “good choice” of servant.

In spite of Barnes’s novel sidestepping the rather significant component of the slave narrative’s engagement with the issue of literacy, I assert that there is an instance of meta-slave- narrative signifying here all the same. Aidan, like Frederick Douglass, comes to a crisis moment in his time as a slave wherein he must come to blows with Kai (the precise details of which will be unpacked in greater detail below). But whereas Douglass’s scrap with slave-breaker Covey, is foundationally inimical, Kai and Aidan’s fight suggests more complications born of the novel’s alternate history scenario (Douglass 42). In a manner both like and unlike the trope of the bondsman learning by observing his “owner’s” pedagogical experiences, Aidan has been emulating Kai’s martial training and learning the rhetorics and literatures and competencies of armed and unarmed combat (Barnes 85). Although his expressions thereof are inexact in their

secondhand and subversive acquisition, they bespeak a syncretic approach that draws upon indigenous Irish wrestling as well as the raw hardiness of a life of labor.

Douglass’ narrative lays bare the historical paradoxes of latent violence within a society predicated on a kind of liberal humanism/racial domination. His act of violent repudiation of the system highlights its complicity with structural violence and the abnegation of Black subjectivity through toil and labour. The significance of his beating Covey up is in his validation of both his psychic and somatic selves (Douglass 43).

What I find to be telling about Douglass’s assertion of his “manhood”/humanity through his capacity to physically challenge an incarnate manifestation of white supremacy, is the fact that he positions himself as no more or less able to do so than any other bondsperson. The claiming of subjectivity by literally fighting for it is closely bound between individual accomplishment and collective potentiality among the marginalized. My reading of Lion’s Blood finds it similarly situated to make such claims about taking subjecthood through potentially violent means.

Barnes—ever the writer to make some nod or reference to various martial arts in his fiction— renders his characters as participant in displays of pugnacious prowess; there are the obligatory one-on-one scraps between master and slave, true, but the novel gets interesting when it takes the stakes of conflict from the simply interpersonal, to the level of plantation insurrection, to scale of full-on war between nations.

There is, to be sure, a potential reading here that allows for a kind of signifying on the mythos of martial grandeur and genteel noblesse oblige that happened to be part and parcel of the mythos of white masculinity of the American South (one might be tempted to find in Kai an analogue for, say, Faulkner's Quentin Compson). That the kind of “honor” at stake in the Wakil's

children's position is not altogether without a similar sort of performativity that saw the proverbial

Confederate Colonel in so many Southern families.

And yet, I hesitate to read the potential parallels as strictly one-to-one in their impact and execution across the fictive boundary of Barnes's alternate history. While both modes of masculinity find their dimensions and parameters in proximity to the skillsets of warfighting, the use of the body in such circumstances stands as perhaps indicative of a marked distance between them. For inasmuch as Bilalistan is a world of some limited implementation of steam-based technologies, in many respects it resists being intelligible by the same mechanizing metrics of the

Antebellum era's dalliance with what we might, in our timeline, identify by virtue of the rather charged appellation of “modernity.” The limited implementation of mechanized warfare within this alternate timeline necessitates a premium being placed upon the individual “warrior” (as opposed to the “soldier” as artifact/institution of Eurocentric, capitalist “modernity”). As such, the lack of mechanical accoutrements suggests a world wherein there is a more readily discernible importance to be placed upon the warrior as an embodied presence in the narrative's universe. That, rather than being a mass instrument of interchangeable “cannon fodder,” the individual body as a signifier of the state/regional potentate's power and prowess, is much more immediate in its impact and significance.

This, in turn, makes the relationship that forms between Kai and Aiden all the more impactful, as it is through the crucible of conflict that the two men come to see and respect one another as human beings. As Lavender points out, Barnes’s work in executing this is admittedly a trifle faulty in its execution, occurring at the expense of a third party in the form of an undifferentiated mass of the Aztec “Other.” But to critique the novel in this way suggests something as arguably drastic as a full re-write of the narrative. Barnes clearly wants to posit an

alternate analogue for the nation-state of Mexico within the novel (signifying with only scarcely veiled language that the “Shrine of the Fathers,” the Al-amu mosque, is to be a convenient near- homophone for the real-world Alamo), and here this external threat does serve as a means of further uniting and solidifying the friendship between Aidan and Kai (Barnes 64). This connection is the one that the author is able to evince between his deuteragonists in the throes of actual combat is nonetheless significant in its implications.

Kai, whose brother Ali has been killed in the conflict, must step up to protect himself as the Wakil's last male heir, and as a man with subjective wants and desires of his own (388). He exists on the battlefield as both his lineage and as an embodied individual. But here too, in keeping with the larger nature of Barnes’s project with the story, Kai must likewise trust his life in part to

Aiden, his bondsman, for failing to do so will result in the Aztecs killing them both (and many other Black and white Bilalians who comprise their comrades). Barnes’s construction of the climactic moment of the novel is a pulpy, do-or-die scenario, whereby in the face of individual, somatic annihilation, there is no space for the socially constructed mode of alterity that has hitherto circumscribed the worlds that the two men have occupied. They become, in the parlance of

Shakespeare and Tom Hanks, a true “Band of Brothers.”

The implications of this kind of interracial homosocial bonding relative to the fictive rendering of the Black somatic in Lion’s Blood are quite salient. In a world defined by slavery and freedom, even of a sort that is an inversion of that as understood within an American context, the

Black body can only be effectively protected and defended insofar as the illusions and delusions of racial Otherness are dispelled. Barnes, in crafting Bilalistan as a world that is ostensibly so radically different from the United States, instead allows us to see quite plainly the crux of the problem all the same. Blackness, in a case such as this, remains a marker of Otherness when read

from a context outside of the novel's reality. In the same way that the novel's play with the signifiers of Black somatic and psyche as inverted in Kai's somewhat nebbish disposition, it is when this defamiliarized characterization exists within the context of the texts larger inversion of the

American racial paradigm that the true impact of Barnes's work might be seen.

Gendering Bodies within the Slave Societies of Lion's Blood

Curiously, within this alternate paradigm, Barnes's work with the kind of bondage that undergirds Bilalistani plantation systems also seems to be invested with an alterity that is an inherently paradoxical rendering of slave status. In the social contexts of Bilalistan, whiteness is at once a subaltern status of near subhumanity and, simultaneously, capable of reflecting a capacity for a range of very “human” qualities. Such qualities are ultimately inclusive of the martial prowess, honor, and courage displayed by Aidan and the other whites during the climactic battle.

Such a blurring of the lines occurs simultaneously at the level of narrative (where it potentially skews into the realm of inconsistent storytelling), and within the novel’s world-building and diegesis. In an instance of dramatic departure from many Euro-American slave narratives, a moment of climactic action occurs when the Aztec forces stage an aggressive incursion into the

Bilalistani province of New Djibouti. When confronted by the looming threat that is some four- days ride from Dar Kush itself, Kai and Ali must raise a regiment of militia troops and meet the enemy on the field of battle. However, to bolster their ranks, Ali declares that any of the whites who volunteer to fight will be granted their freedom (353).

The instance is a curious one, and one that presents itself to the characters as rife with mortally catastrophic risks and dizzying potential reward. It also raises questions about Barnes’s take on the relative manifestations of martial masculinity among his Black and white characters.

There is an air of suspicion that pervades the ranks of white mamelukes (slave soldiers) that their

masters are simply using them for cannon fodder. This proves to be quite justifiable, because even though the Black cavaliers and foot soldiers do allow the mamelukes to wield pikes, and even train them in the basic arts of using them—a point that does not go unremarked upon, especially in light of the potential for servile/freedmen’s insurrection—the techniques are purposefully limited, and are seen by the Black officers as fitting the whites solely for diversionary tactics in the face of the

Aztecs (365).

There is a particularly telling moment, however, that comes about in the aftermath of the first engagement with the enemy. The commander of the unified Bilalistani militia is none other than Shaka kaSenzangakhona—Shaka Zulu—whose fictional analogue in Barnes's novel has proven himself repeatedly to be the kind of commander who balances his acts of genuine brilliance in strategies and tactics with a nihilistic callousness towards his soldiers that edges into outright malicious caprice. Subsequent the first engagement in the current campaign against the Aztecs,

Shaka rounds up deserters before brutally wielding his umkhonto spear to butcher the white mamelukes himself. When confronted by one of his young and unbloodied Black officers who also fled in the face of the enemy, Shaka threatens to murder him also, unless he “proves his manhood” by stabbing an unarmed mameluke (377).

We might read and understand Barnes work in depicting both Zulu and Muslim Bilalistani men this way in light of conceptions of honor culture as derived from actual Subsaharan peoples.

John Iliffe’s Honor in African History lends much in the way of credence to such approaches. His reading of Islamic African beliefs about heshima (one of several Swahili terms for “honor,” with

Arabic etymological roots), adds salience to the discussion, as it posits a kind of honor that might be achieved , rather than innately possessed by individuals of high birth (34). Importantly, as Iliffe defines the concept, even slaves might be capable of acquiring this kind of status.

The ubiquity in the latter books of Barnes’s novel of a need for honor in terms of defining both humanity and—more specifically—masculinity seems to lie at the heart of the foundational notions of identity that he is attempting to define. And that this kind of honor-focused masculinity might reside (or be absent) in the person of either a Black patrician or a white bondsman is a marker of culture that potentially signifies a rather stark departure from the kind of racial hierarchy extant in actual Pre-Emancipation America. Biblical traditions of the sort remarked upon and castigated by Jacobs and Douglass as “Slaveholder Christianity” manipulate aspects of the faith to ensure a categorical and perpetual manifestation of white supremacy as social and spiritual norm.

Barnes's fictional traditions of “Fatimite Islam” offer no comparable analogue to the Hamitic

Curse, or other ex post facto attempts to justify chattel bondage through Biblical allusion. While there is space for critical interrogation of Islamic understandings of a servant’s defined “role” in the community (of a sort that Kai, Ali, and their father all successively muse upon), the novel works to present a way of challenging this at the same time, and does not shy from leaning into this paradox as means for progressive-minded individuals like Kai to begin to pick apart the edges of the institution.

But we might hesitate to go so far as to label Kai the Bilalistani version of an “abolitionist.”

In fact, while he does follow in his father’s footsteps as a vocal critic of slavery, Barnes's novel does not really present the reader with a kind of organized social activism for such figures to find society-wide camaraderie. If slavery is of a subtly different sort in this alternate America, then the systemic attempts to dismantle it are of a much more radically distinct kind, if for no other reason than their comparative absence 14 . Nevertheless, Kai does take on the appearances of a liberator

14 Kai’s father presents a rather unique outlier here, because he has made a name for himself in speaking out on behalf of a “Manumission Act” in the New Djibouti senate. The act was a stretch for his credibility, and its defeat meant that he suffered in his advocacy for it, but he is described as continuously speaking on behalf of the bondspeople, even if his voice is generally heard in isolation (227)

himself subsequent to the battle at Mosque Al-Amu, freeing any and all mamelukes who fight with him against the Aztecs, and going a step further to free their families as well, promising them— not forty acres and a mule—but some land and enough gold to start a life. Indeed, upon his freeing of Aidan and Sophia, he issues them papers of documentation with the legend, “Declaration of

Emancipation,” a document which both Tucker (437) and Lavender (85) have remarked, suggests a simultaneous signification on the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation

Proclamation.

If masculinity in Lion’s Blood is coded as directly proportionate to a body’s capacity for both thought and fighting, femininity occupies a rather different space in the intersectional readings of body politics as they are understood in Bilalistan. If men garner humanity through

“honor,” a reading of the novel might likewise suggest that women come close to gaining it through

“virtue.” We might meaningfully explore Lion’s Blood’s work with femininity through the figure of slave-consort Sophia De Moroc. In characterizing Sophia, Barnes juxtaposes rumination about a very pulpy, idealized sort of romantic love, with the rather more carnal/somatic realities of sex, sex work, and motherhood. Such work with femininity is structured in engagement with the social aspects of the all-encompassing, all-corrupting institution of slavery that so completely defines their world.

Sophia is a woman born in the boundary region of Andalus (Spain) between the European hinterlands and imperial metropoles of North Africa. As such, the novel positions her as a figure defined by her liminality. Kai’s gaze is the means by which her features are read: “although her skin was pale her lips were full and African, her hair and eyes dark, her nose more broad and sensuous than any of the poor thin-blooded Irish girls” (166). Indeed, when considered in relation to the complications of her genealogy—"the product of the Moorish empire’s influence on the

bloodlines of Southern Europe” (166)—and an ironic inversion of the infamous “One Drop Rule” that defined so much of the theory of racial quantizing in America, she might also, arguably, be said to somatically signify on the tropes of the “tragically” multi-racial figure in extant works of historical slave narratives.

As a character, though, she is ever caught between men who would want access to her body for mere gratification, or for the production of offspring. Sophia is introduced to the novel as a

"gift" for Kai, who has hitherto been something of a lothario, roaming with Aidan in search of various, and willing bondswomen with whom to have conjugal relations. Kai’s father produces

Sophia to him for his birthday expressly for the purposes of becoming his concubine (167). Her life prior to traveling to Bilalistan has been focused entirely on training for this purpose (not with

Kai specifically, but to service men of stature and renown), and she is shown to be adept at her craft. In spite of the implicit/explicit power imbalance between them that—as in American slavery—precludes her being able to act as agent or give consent in these endeavors, Barnes writes

Sophia as a character with ambitions in spite of the sobering realities of her position. In particular, she has aims of inducing Kai to free her after a life of service to him.

Yet, while Sophia’s plans position her as a figure at the capricious mercy of Kai as a man and slavery as an institution, she ultimately finds herself in danger of irrelevance when she finds that Kai is to be betrothed to Shaka’s niece, Nandi. In the face of a socially sanctioned love between

Black folks of commensurate social status, a love that might take on dimensions beyond the solely somatic realm of sexual gratification and garner a modicum of social prestige as well, Sophia is faced with the incontrovertible fact that her hopes of using her body as a means of securing her freedom are quite forlorn. As a result, she seeks solace—“freedom,” the novel puts it explicitly—

in the arms of Aidan, with whom the novel suggests that she might have the opportunity of finding not merely satisfaction, but happiness (211).

Sophia is thus read as being a female body caught between the white and Black male gaze.

Unaware of the burgeoning romance between his friend and his erstwhile lover, Kai continues to desire her, in spite of his own betrothal to Nandi. He goes even so far as to offer Aidan the chance to duel him for her, when he ultimately finds his friend in bed with Sophia on a visit to the Quarters

(229). By this point, Sophia has given herself quite completely to Aidan, and has ultimate aims of beginning and sustaining a nuclear family with him. I find the positioning of Sophia here as something of relative interest and import in the reading of embodied femininity in Barnes's novel.

In spite of her position outside of modes of respectability within the bounds of the Black Islamic

Patriarchy embodied by Kai and his family, and her contrasting status with Nandi as a concubine against potential wife, she is nonetheless found to be capable of a vexed sort of desirability.

Whether we are to read Barnes’s positioning of her vis-a-vis Kai as simply a matter of his assertion of a kind of ownership and a need to reaffirm his ambiguous status of mastery to Aidan by taking her back from him, or as a more generalized take on late adolescent confusion of love and lust, the fact remains that Kai is willing to fight Aidan for her. And, importantly, Aidan is willing to do likewise; to risk corporal reprisal against him in spite of Kai’s claims in front of an assembled body of white witnesses that the fight would be a fair one with no consequences besides those inflicted by the combatants upon one another. The fight over a woman's body becomes a matter of honor between men, in spite of their vast differences in social and legal status. The narrative frames the conflict as simply one between male-bodied humans.

However, while we can acknowledge that Barnes's work with the paradigms of slavery here do unseat American notions of a slave’s sub/in/non-human status in hierarchal order beneath

the master by replacing it with a framework of potential egalitarian dimensions, we should be remiss in not acknowledging the casualty of this process: the bondswoman. Whilst the novel poses a modicum of agency for Sophia to choose Aidan over Kai, the deployment of her as a damsel trope to be fought over by two would-be male suitors arguably does not go quite as far as it might in terms of actualizing that stance. Put another way, Aidan’s ability to face Kai in combat as a

(hu)man is given cause solely because it potentially obfuscates and marginalizes Sophia’s humanity.

The figure of Sophia, then, is one defined as object of contention between two men. And yet, while her signification of a mere prize is evident on the superficial level during the segment of the fight with Kai’s perspective centered, the novel wrestles with that misapprehension in providing readers accesses to Aidan and—importantly—Sophia’s own perspectives on the fight as well. That Kai’s gaze as directed towards Sophia would position her as something between a concubine and a particularly pleasurable sex toy, Aidan is suggested to the reader to be able to value her companionship more holistically. The novel connotes a very real—very traditionally patriarchal—conception of romantic love that Aidan feels for her. He fights for her because, the novel suggests, the intersectional manifestations of systemic oppression that weigh upon her, and the previously articulated inability for her to win safety and freedom as a concubine, necessitates the interposition of his body as potential sacrifice for her own.

The rub in all of this is how circuitous it all seems when juxtaposed against American notions of chattel slavery. When Harriet Jacobs was object to the sexual depredations of Dr. Flint, her narrative suggests that there was some manner of recourse that she might attempt in order to stymie his attempts of rape, whether this is through the appeals to her grandmother or a lover, or by playing ignorant of his propositions. There was agency on her part to frustrate, or at the very

least delay , her encounters with white supremacist patriarchy; but Flint never truly acknowledges her or any Black family member, friend, or lover’s humanity.

By contrast, to Kai at least, Sophia and Aidan are able to force at least a temporary acknowledgement of their vexed status on Dar Kush and through the redeployment of that liminal social proximity that they have cultivated with Kai. Whether it is simply a matter of a more consistent form of honor that Kai embraces (as contrasted with a Dr. Flint or some other lascivious white man thrashing in the spaces between propriety and domination), he does not simply take

Sophia from Aidan. Nor does he utilize a likewise disgusting manifestation of his domination and sell Aidan away for the sake of keeping Sophia to himself. Such practices are not foreign to

Bilalistan’s Black planter class, as earlier in the novel to cow the recalcitrant slave Brian, Kai’s father has the white man’s lover sold with neither hesitation nor compunction.

The novel is quite invested in maintaining this complicated relationship among Kai, Aidan, and Sophia for some time longer yet. However, in working to create a subplot of romantic melodrama, it does raise questions regarding the nature of masculinity, femininity, and indeed, humanity of bondspeople in a rather more frank way than might be expected. After Aidan demonstrates his prowess and ability to maintain a stronger control of his emotions and pugilistic proclivity to thoroughly trounce Kai, the latter is forced to admit defeat, and skulks off to mend bruises to his body and his pride. Hearkening back to the scene in Douglass’s narrative, the novel posits that through fighting, and fighting back, the slaves attain a modicum of recognition for their ability to exist as human beings.

Structuring Stranger Souths: Surveying Alternate History Texts’ Work with the Black Body

All the same, Lion’s Blood does seem to want to raise questions about the nature of fairly individualized, interpersonal recognition across the color line. This is hardly the sort of

institutional repudiation of a kind with an abolitionist social movement; but In beginning to address the questions relevant to race works within the context of the novel, Barnes presents us with the braided narratives of Aidan and Kai, as he follows each from boyhood to their maturity.

In many respects, the novel is, at least as much as it is grand commentary on the social constructs of identity, a simple bildungsroman. The deuteragonists begin their narratives as young and naive in the mechanics of their world; but through their assorted experiences with the problematic nature of their respective realities, each must rise to his respective occasions and determine what life, freedom, and family ultimately mean.

Reading the implications of utilizing a bifurcation of perspectives into parallel deuteragonists along racial lines, Lion’s Blood’s point-of-view characters’ mutually inclusive coming-of-age journeys take us directly to one of the issues addressed within Hegelian phenomenology: the ideas of lordship and bondage relative to self-consciousness. In an embodied manifestation of this allegorical dialectic, the novel’s progression suggests that Kai and Aiden’s fulfillment of their personal growth and development is contingent upon an active recognition of each other, not simply as bodies, but as mutually autonomous and sentient embodied subjectivities. Such a moment of recognition and reconciliation is literalized in their context of actual master and slave, insofar as the novel’s allows the reader to see how the respective instances of subjectivity grapple with the other man as friend and as manifest agent/victim of structural inequality.

But such an approach suggests an equal significance expressed in both physical and emotional maturation. The initial dialectic Barnes uses to frame Kai’s journey is one that is defined by learning to empathize with Aidan repeatedly over the course of the men’s mutually reinforcing recognition of their mutual self-consciousnesses. Structurally, Aiden’s positioning as the third-

person perspective for a number of the early chapters allows the reader to experience his self- consciousness through a chronicling of the litany of physical and epistemic violences done to it.

The reader appreciates the fact that he is a self-aware consciousness within a body that the systems of oppression and domination seek to deny that subjectivity and render him and those around him into self-moving objects.

The novel though, goes a step further in its use of dialectics by having Aiden and Kai both be possessed of respective self-consciousness. Kai repeatedly struggles to see Aiden as a being with his own autonomous desires and concerns, in spite of the complicating factor of the two men’s ostensible friendship. Likewise, the systemic oppression that places Aiden beneath Kai on the

Bilalistani social hierarchy, makes it difficult for the bondsman to recognize his putative “master” as a human being with his own animating drives and concerns. But on more than one instance,

Aiden actively compromises his personal safety and that of his community of fellow enslaved

Europeans in order to defend Kai.

As the novel progresses and the Kai/Aidan dyad grows increasingly strained and complicated through the addenda of various other strands of familial and communal connection, at the heart of the novel’s concern with their relationship is that they are able to conceptualize one another, not merely as objective flesh on either side of the arbitrary signification of a color/boundary line, but instead as mutually autonomous embodied subjectivities. So the novel positions the discussion of self-conscious recognition in both physical and psychological terms.

This approach returns us to the framework of Spillers’s body/flesh split: it is only in recognizing the other as a body—a fusion of somatic and subjective—that the problematical hierarchy implicit in the racialization process can be interrogated to the point that the narrative can present the pretense of “friendship” between its characters.

Rather than retreat into the naive and puerile notion that some abstract “power of friendship” is all that it would take to upset the totality of Bilalistan’s slave society, Barnes’s exercises in world-building wrestle with complexities of just what friendship itself might actually mean across this similarly reified color line. It posits an element of physical conflict to force a mutual recognition of self-consciousness, for one thing. The novel reads the measuring of somatic skill as necessary for the men’s respective growth, and it is through the skin-to-skin contact of fists-to-faces that dispels the fanciful notion of an uncorrupted “friendship” within the corrupting apparatus of chattel bondage.

But whereas a Hegelian dialectic in this sense would leave one or the other in a position of ideologically subordinate to a more powerful self-consciousness, Barnes’s text creates a third way, wherein ultimately, recognition is possible, and friendship—or, at the very least, mutual respect of the Other self as similarly possessed of a subjectivity of equal capacity—can exist. Which would naturally lead to the inevitable next step of individualized emancipation.

Likewise, in addition to the Hegelian notions of selfhood, Lion’s Blood also exists in a tense ideological dialogue with Enlightenment era philosophies and their (presumptive) universal applications vis-a-vis consciousness and Cartesian dichotomies of mind/body dualism. This is, I would argue, the case for the preponderance of Barnes’s fiction. However, whereas the crux of such philosophies of rationalism and empiricism is the privileging of the psyche at the expense of the somatic, this novel deploys Spillers’s notions of bodies to become central sites for the actuation of narrative action and identity politics. So yes, Lion’s Blood is interested in discussing bodies’ relationships to the mind and the spirit as a way of gauging relative growth and maturation. At the same time, the Black male bodies on display here are precisely the means by which feats of unparalleled physical prowess are given historical legibility. Barnes’s work with

these bodies ultimately problematizes the Cartesian dualism that has left its neoliberal fingerprints across the aggregate corpus of his contemporary SFF writers.

Lion’s Blood , as an “adventure story,” presents a narrative that is grounded in a parallel historical moment to the reification of bodies—somatic sites of autonomous subjectivity—as modes of racial hierarchy that sought to put qualifying markers on what might constitute

“humanity”. During the Antebellum period, the Aristotelian adage of the slave as a self-moving tool carried some credence, and as a result, the seemingly self-evident humanity of Black folks was bracketed and qualified as a means of enacting abjection. The creation of a slave, as Douglass describes, is through forcibly splitting a person’s mind from their body.

Conclusions

Lion’s Blood begins with a premise that is equal parts audacious and elegant. A novel that, at its heart, is interested in taking a brutal and ubiquitously violent moment in the story of the

American republic, and, by the conventions of alternate history, creating a narrative that makes every indignity and dehumanizing act new again. Kai and Aidan are constantly fighting—against each other, against the boundaries of their respective stations, against mutual annihilation—and in their pervasive conflicts, they manage to learn something about their respective stances and experiences as embodied subjects. In recognizing each other’s humanity across the boundaries of this alternate construction of racializing assemblage, they find the means to forge a friendship in the crucibles of their mutual maturation.

But the novel never lets the reader forget the all-encompassing toxicity of slavery as institution. Inasmuch as Kai’s story is about him becoming a Black man through the various initiations that such a maturation might necessitate, Barnes never lets his readers forget that the

Wakil’s son is the putative “master” of the bodies of a number of enslaved human beings. That, in

spite of his claims of love for Sophia and friendship with Aidan, these relationships are always- already overdetermined by the fact that he may lay claim to their bodies and labor without regard for their consent. For practical purposes, the institution that determines their lives renders them objectified flesh ; but it is only when the bondspeople initiate dialogue in the mutually intelligible language of violence, here, that the flesh behind those fists transmogrifies into individuated bodies.

In beating Kai up, as Douglass puts it, Aidan goes from slave to man.

Reading the novel as a work of meta-slavery, and a means of defamiliarizing human bondage is certainly a meaningful approach of situating it as a significant text of Black Atlantic speculative fiction. Equally important, though, to simply staging the points about bondage and subjectivity, is Barnes’s less immediately overt signification of a separation of Black bodies from enslaved bodies. At stake in Lion’s Blood ’s doing so is an immensely productive opportunity to reassess certain problematical strands of identity that Paul Gilroy highlights in The Black Atlantic .

The question of the so-called slave sublime, and the projects of rehabilitative, and vindicationist historiographies of Afrocentrism, come into stark relief as the novel presents an alternate history scenario that necessitates a utility of precolonial African civilizations and functional understanding of the realities of Afrodiasporic life under hegemonic slavocracies. Gilroy’s critique of

Afrocentrism as ideological stance marked by “Blacks becom[ing] dominant by virtue of either biology or culture,” and whites’ relegation to a “subordinate role” does seem to find a kind of fictive praxis in the broadest strokes of Barnes’s novel (191). To take the “we were kings and queens” thesis of many strands of Kemetic, “Stolen Legacy,” Afrocentric thought, and force it to confront the somatic and psychological implications of their juxtaposition with a presumptively corrupting nature of lordship and bondage

But this act in and of itself is no mean feat for the novel, and Barnes’s characterizations quickly attest to as much. In order to create a fictive world that is a believable exercise in the inherent metatextual ironies that alternate history as a genre presupposes, Lion’s Blood , as a novel of Bilalistani racially-coded chattel slavery, gains some efficacy through signifying upon the various slave narratives drawn from the real-world experiences of American slaves as rough analogues. This overt signification upon the slave narrative as genre allows for certain plot-beats in Barnes’s novel—the middle passage, whippings, self-liberations, rebellions, and encounters with institutionalized rape culture and toxic hegemonic masculinity—to take on a kind of significance that reads as a palpably affective callback to the somatic, ontological, and epistemic dangers facing the Bodies of enslaved Black folks in America.

Such an overt signification on the genre of the slave narrative, though, is contingent upon a welter of other genre concerns that I think it vital to remain cognizant of. For instance, the very historical distance that exists between the contemporary America that Barnes himself exists in, and the antebellum historical moment that was the milieu of the slave narratives themselves suggests that the novel is participating in a postmodern engagement with transatlantic narratives of the Afrodiasporic past. Extant scholarship on the text refines these historiographical and literary genre questions: Juan Elices’s reading of Lion’s Blood focuses on it as postcolonial deconstruction of history; Jeffery Allen Tucker’s work, on the other hand, grapples with its place relative to the broader canon of neo-slave narratives. present Lion’s Blood as sweeping reading of historiographical metafiction. Both authors make cogent and helpful points about Barnes's signification on slavery in American (and global) historical time. The novel here, as elsewhere in the scholarship of contemporary narratives of slavery, is understood as part of a larger literary project of utilizing speculative approaches to re-engage with, and further unpack/explore the

traumatic site of “the past” in African American Fiction. From a Diasporic perspective, the central conceit in Lion’s Blood presumes to read the embodied trauma of chattel bondage and an historiography of continental African cultures of nobility, honor, and warrior ethos simultaneously.

While there is certainly much to be gleaned from reading the novel as intervention into the construction and conception of Transatlantic histories in this way, my interest in Lion’s Blood (and elsewhere in Barnes's oeuvre) hinges more specifically upon the way he uses bodies, minds, spirits, and a dynamic interplay among them to make statements about subjectivity in the face of appalling social circumstances. The novel presents alternate history conventions juxtaposed with neo- and meta-slavery narrative tropes. Thus framed, the chronopolitics of Black bodies in historical time make for a site of academic discourse on its place in Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction and genre capacities for interventions in the understanding of historicized racial ontologies. Lion’s Blood works because of the persistence and contestation of the past, and its metatextual and ironic reframing of Blackness in spacetime.

Thus, there is rather more at stake in the novel’s foundational counterfactual than a mere inversion of racial hierarchy and attendant social and legal power dynamics. In this chapter, I will delineate and discuss the varying dimensions of the novel’s reimagined history as enacted upon and through the manifestations of its Black somatic subjectivity. In order to do so, I center the analysis of the novel on its bifurcation of a faux-primordial constructed conflation of “Black body” and “enslaved body”—or “body” and “flesh” to signify on Spillers’ formulations—within the context of American historiography (261). In Barnes's work of dissecting on the racial schema of

Black bodies by ironically contrasting their historical status as chattel laborers and their fictive status as rulers, I argue that readers are presented with a totalizing defamiliarization of the very nature of Transatlantic bondage.

It is through the ironic inversion of the racial schema through this kind of defamiliarization that I read the novel’s splitting the historical conflation of Black and enslaved bodies. Doing so allows Barnes to explore the implications of a Black American body that is a product of a very different relationship between its somatic realities and the socio-political historical processes of bondage, imperialism, religion, and modernity (373). Yet this act of, as Jarrett puts it,

“denaturalizing,” the status of the Black body as subservient, is undertaken elsewhere in the

African American Literary canon. Fantastical works such as Morrison’s Beloved, Butler’s Wild

Seed, and Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, all manage to stir this pot somewhat, by asking readers to reimagine slavery as a site of time-displacement, haunting, and vampirism. Such efforts of reimagining racial interaction serves as means of engendering a kind of individualized Black agency against the systems of oppression that bondage perpetuated. Speculative fiction at a more generalized level has thus wrestled with the concept in a host of ways.

In the following chapter, we consider such an alternative approach through a reading of

Barnes’s dark fantasy novel, Blood Brothers . In this novel, which antedates Lion’s Blood by roughly a decade, we find him also working with interpretations of slavery, but without the various attendant conventions of ironic inversion seen in alternate history. Instead, whereas Lion’s Blood is a work defined by human action and agency separate and apart from fantastical intervention,

Blood Brothers, like the above-mentioned The Gilda Stories , and Wild Seed, injects magical elements into the narratives of slavery. In each of these cases, the fantasy comes from the Black body as being literally indestructible/undying in the face of the very worst excesses of white supremacy.

CHAPTER 3

ETERNAL DARKNESS:

NARRATING THE TRANSHISTORICAL BLACK BODY IN BLOOD BROTHERS

I'll let you know from the get go: / A little garlic and a cross won't stop this blood sucking-ist / Slave making-ist,/ hostage taking-ist, sneakiest / Continental rapist, make no mistake in this / I'm not speaking on a fictional figment of / Folklore, but more like the type to provoke war / Spreading lies to the poor, starting plagues with a cure / When opportunity knocks he locks doors to / Ensure outlasting prescribed expiration / The reign of the undead is self preservation. / He feeds off the lives of others / But not with fangs in your jugular / He uses the drugs and gun smugglers / Leaving a trail of mindless zombies and childless mommies, protected by powerful armies / As they guard the beast who hides by days / In a deep dark coffin that blocks the sun rays.

J-Live “Vampire Hunter J”

Introduction

The 1996 novel Blood Brothers represents a kind of spacetime nexus wherein Steven

Barnes’s fiction is able to directly and immediately link notions of Blackness and violences against Black bodies, past and present. The novel is about several things, inclusive of a family separated by divorce, a kidnapping of a child for an occult ritual, and an interracial pair of vigilantes. But these contemporary occurrences of genre-fiction melodrama are themselves unfolding against the backdrop of the larger sociohistorical happenings. In Blood Brothers, the past is literally reaching out from beyond the event-horizon of the narrative present’s here-and- now to directly link the experiences of a late-twentieth century Black family with the specters and monsters of the Antebellum era.

By stretching the timeline of subjective(/relativistic) experience in this manner, Blood

Brothers suggests a kind of play with, as Michelle M. Wright would identify it, the “physics of

Blackness.” Barnes’s novel uses its characters’ transhistorical presences—undying bodies and/or

undead consciousnesses that exist across various historical moments and inhabit a different dimension of temporality—to stretch the boundaries of Black ontological spacetimes. While this is useful in helping us see the constructedness of linear progress narratives in the creation of history, Blood Brothers ’s use of immortal characters to link the Antebellum past with the 1990s further suggests a kind of play with Wright’s notions of vertical and horizontal connections between members of racialized communities (74). Hierarchical structures of relationships— parents to children, for example, and master to slave—are just as complicated in their temporalities as are the roughly “peer” level connections between friends/allies (74). And all of these coordinate geometries of connectivity are immediately determined by their relationship to

American ontologies of Blackness as epiphenomenon.

In addition to staging a journey through transhistorical spacetime by persistent presences of the Afrodiasporic past, the novel thus posits a sankofa-inflected cyclical chronopolitics. The immortal monsters of history skulk in the narrative shadows before directly confronting the would-be heroes, Blood Brothers seeks a kind of deeper relevancy by staging the fictive conflicts in the lead-up, midst of, and fallout from the 1992 LA Riots in the wake of the acquittal of police officers charged in the assault of Rodney King. Thus, while the novel presents the trappings of dark fantasy and historical fiction, the conventions of meta-slavery are likewise here on display as well, and Barnes builds a conceptual bridge across the gulf of years that connects the historical trauma of racialized bondage with the contemporary traumas and violence directed against Black bodies.

To elaborate on the specific shape that this narrative takes, Blood Brothers is a story of a contemporary Black family attempting to protect their children from being sacrificed in an occult ritual being perpetrated by a pair of immortals who have been alive in America for centuries.

Still recovering from having survived the LA riots, Derek Waites and his estranged wife, Rachel

Childe, find themselves in hiding when a cadre of men posing as police officers attempt to kidnap their son for the ritual. Aided by an escaped white convict, Austin Tucker (who, it turns out, is distantly related to Rachel), the Derek, Rachel, and their children, Troy and Dahlia, are brought to safety(?) in a white supremacist survivalist camp in the California hills. This respite proves to be predictably illusory, as the camp is raided by the forces pursuing them, and Derek and Austin must work together to infiltrate the cabal of their adversaries. Ultimately, they must track down and defeat the pair of immortals and end their child-stealing, life extension rituals once and for all.

The novel’s plot makes for a pulpy speculative adventure, to be sure. But it is beneath the fantastical elements and ubiquitous action sequences that Barnes is able to lay the groundwork for a particularly provocative kind of discourse about life, death, and race in the United States. In evoking the cinematic trope of the interracial "buddy adventure" (harkening to such celluloid racial fantasies as The Defiant Ones) , Blood Brothers translates this dynamic into the realm of its more literary dimensions. Derek and Austin's pair of opposites is explored both contextually and historically, as their bodies and subjective frameworks are inherently overdetermined by factors of both history and contemporary racial circumstance. And yet, this approach is not solely reserved for the identifying and defining of the hero characters. Barnes mirrors the Derek/Austin dyad with its darker manifestation seen in their foes: orchestrating the centuries-long series of child abductions are DuPris, a white man and one-time master of Bloodroot Plantation, and the former slave and nightmarishly powerful African sorcerer, Niles.

But while this is indeed a use of history that is, perhaps, parallel to what Barnes is able to do in Lion’s Blood , Blood Brothers opts for the creation of a narrative around the trope of a

transhistorical body, rather than one that is embodied countermemory. This earlier (and narratively unconnected) text traffics in the speculative elements of immortality, ghosts/spirits, and magic, and deploys these fantastic elements as its novum, rather than rely on the more mundane mechanics of Lion’s Blood ’s “true alternate history.” And these events are linked to the historical past by framing the characters themselves in direct relationship with individuals formerly held in bondage. A body that transcends the markers of mechanical (years) and biological (generations) time, Blood Brothers asks readers to consider a tense sort of dialectic between what “slavery” and “freedom” might mean in the American context. Barnes’s work with the trope of immortality in the context of an overtly racialized historiography likewise allows him to craft a highly visible through-line from the Antebellum past to the then-current moment of the early and mid-1990s.

The implications of history and intersecting gendered/raced identities of the characters in the novel also lend themselves to the consideration of genealogy as articulated through the text of Spillers’ essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” I have brought up this landmark text in the preceding chapter as a means of addressing the dichotomy it presupposes between “body” and

“flesh,” and will return to these topoi again in subsequent chapters that look to parse meaning of them through conversations surrounding the Cartesianism in Barnes’s cyberpunk-esque SF works. But it is here, in relation to the matters of bodily marking and gendered definitions within

Blackness that the larger ideas of kinship, ontology, and “family” might be aptly discussed.

Blood Brothers wrestles with family both within and without the systems of slavery, and links the historical landscapes of the Antebellum and turn-of-the-millennium America through its utility of the fantastic presence of its immortal characters. While Barnes represents

(trans)historical patriarchs DuPris and Niles as consummately monstrous beings who care little

for their children save to symbolically devour them, like the mythical Kronos, their diametrical opposites and moral antitheses Derek and Austin serve as potential correctives to narratives of pathological patriarchs. And in the midst of all of this, Dahlia Childe exists as the archetypal

Black mother, true progenitor of the lineage and spiritual means by which the various “babies” are afforded a modicum of security.

In Blood Brothers , Barnes proffers a reading of the Black body as an historical text by staging it as several distinctive kinds of perpetual existence. In defiance of the panoply of weapons that institutional white supremacy can bring to bear on these bodies, Barnes posits means by which the Black body might endure: 1.) through the perpetuation of generations and the creation of a kind of genetic/genealogical resistance to annihilation, 2.) through the persistence of Black subjectivity even after the body itself has been completely annihilated, in the form of ghostly/spiritual existence (to protect those generations), and finally, 3.)through the speculative imaginary of the immortal Black body (which is achieved precisely at the expense of generations). Arguably, the posthumous textual/subjective existence in the pages of narratives is a fourth way that we might read the novel's positioning of Blackness as existing beyond the pale of white supremacy's abilities to destroy it through attempts at somatic death.

Notably, what the novel does with the persistence of Black subjectivity and selfhood through its signification on the slave narrative tradition is not merely to highlight the finding of the textual remains of a character who experienced slavery. Blood Brothers ' foray into the realm of the speculative and fantastic also allows it to build upon this notion with a combined approach that facilitates a critical reading of both the words and the actual writer of them.

Blood Feud The African’s Bids for Subversion and Domination

Of the various characters who populate Barnes’s novels, perhaps none is quite so consummately enigmatic as the one known most regularly by the supremely semantically overdetermined moniker, “the African.” Serving as a point of narrative linkage between Blood

Brothers and Iron Shadows (1998), this skulking living-spectre of a man who is alternatively identified as “Niles,” and “The Scarred Man,” is manifestly liminal, utterly confounding other characters’ attempts to apprehend his meaning or larger significance. And even when his supernatural longevity is brought to a catastrophic end by the combined efforts of the protagonists of Blood Brothers , he manages to persist into the follow-up novel as a kind of haunting presence that bedevils the lives of yet more Angelenos with actions set in motion prior to his demise.

Blackness here has a curious sort of function, existing as it does across the warp and woof of Afrodiasporic history. The villainous Niles, with his functions as a terrifying corruption of the bridges the Transatlantic world, linking human sociopathologies of African empires with toxic patriarchal desires to dominate the bodies and minds of people in the US as well. But Barnes, in a manner that seems to become legible within the context of Michelle Wright’s notions of a epiphenomena of Blackness, wrestles with the question of what a figure like this might mean, and how the latent corruptions of his desires for power might become all the more exacerbated when decontextualized from the continent, and refigured by the apparatus of American chattel bondage.

Judith Lee’s postulation that “human immortality” is something of a paradoxical contradiction of terms, perhaps serves as a means by which to begin considerations of the novel’s antagonists. Lee syllogistically defines “human” as something inherently mortal, and capable of finitely experiencing “life” before meeting with death as its inevitable teleos. By this logic, an

immortal being—something that never meets that teleos—is thus no longer “human” as the concept is consensually understood.

Lee’s reading of the paradoxical nature of “human immortality,” though, need not necessarily create a paradigm whereby all immortals are necessarily “evil.” Writers like Octavia

Butler and Jewelle Gomez use the figurations of Black immortals as a means of interrogating systemic inequity by providing a kind of fantastical mode of empowerment to otherwise

Otherized and abject Black bodies. Gomez’s work with Black vampires in particular, has been remarkably successful in creating space not simply for Black bodies in transhistorical space, but queer Black women’s bodies in particular. In such a context, as A. Timothy Spaulding points out, the process of vampirism is less inherently parasitic, and more of a mutualistic sort of nurturing between consensual partners, that creates a kind of solidarity within the margins of

American society writ-large (106). Gomez’s vampires are also not cloistered in a remote an ahistorical Transylvania castle as would be the case for Bram Stoker’s more closely canonical literary disciples. Instead, as Spaulding writes, “the vampire, and the narrative genre as a whole become vehicles of history, rather than an escape from it” (104). Gomez’s work with the superficially monstrous figure of European vampire lore, instead leans in on the humanity of the immortal, and works to craft a viable, loving, and sympathetic undying heroine.

The slippery nature of what might constitute “humanity” is further complicated by

Barnes’s novels work within the context of American chattel slavery. Weheliye’s schematic for ordering “humanity” into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans in recognition of the hierarchical taxonomies of liberal humanism does much to address this issue of ontology relative to Blackness (8). But the role of the Black vampire within historical time stands as a means by which to rattle this tower of hegemonic ordering by imagining an empowerment to the most

abject of its levels. That the nonhuman Black vampire is gifted with somatic abilities (and powers, if not power ) becomes a potential vehicle to imagine a liberationist re-centering of those hitherto marginalized (Day 56). Barnes's novel sums up the conundrum facing a Black immortal in an ironical remark:

In the one part of the Americas where the African could find human beings to slaughter and defile, he himself was considered less than human. And that means that he needed the help of Augustus DuPris. Both are slave. Both are masters. (311)

Empowered though Niles is, his nonhuman status is as much a factor of abjection in the face of white supremacy asis his preternatural magics.

Though beings like Niles, DuPris, and Dahlia are not, strictly-speaking, vampires (as traditionally imagined in the Anglo-American literary context), they are certainly no longer

“human,” because they have transcended the finitude of life. This, though, begs the question of what exactly they might be . In my considerations of Barnes’s take on immortality, it becomes apparent that his figuration of it still leans in the direction of its capacity to create monsters.

Niles’s immortality does not give him empathy, or serve him as a means of revolutionary resistance to institutional white supremacy. Instead, his undying, transhistorical somatic presence is depicted as making him only more desirous for more knowledge and, by extension, more power. This representative manifestation of a pathologized Black masculinity eclipses and precludes any space for any other way of comprehending historical position, as the individual takes primacy over connections to either ancestral past or future descendants.

And "the individual" him(/her)self is legible, once again, by the centrality of the text's positioning of embodied subjectivity. In Blood Brothers , the iconography of this is rather explicit, presenting the individual as a linked presence of body-and-spirit. The novel begins with an epigraph attributed to a “Congolese saying”:

Soul and skin are linked: Soul can lead skin. Skin can call soul. Both soul and skin can be stolen or torn apart. Shun the man who would tear skin—for he is evil. But fear the man who steals the soul, for that man can steal stars from the sky. (Epigraph)

The linkage between the somatic “skin” and the numinal “soul,” is here made quite explicit, and serves as a means of demonstrating the foundational element of Barnes’s fiction that is endemic to the dissertation’s reading of his oeuvre. Blood Brothers in particular literalizes this conceit by presenting Niles and DuPris as a pair of soul-stealers. Their existence through stealing/“buying” bodies outright, and subsequently ripping the souls from those bodies suggest that they are truly beings to be both shunned and feared.

I find the articulation of their immortality as contingent upon “soul stealing” in particular, to be a curious counterpoint to the novel’s other preoccupation with blood. While the title certainly makes moves to highlight the larger implications of blood as a connotative of interstitial linkages across space and time, the soul or spirit serves a sort of parallel function. As though the two—with blood perhaps serving the semantic somatic purposes here more consistently than

“skin”—reflect the two halves of the physical/numinal dialectic.

But I also contend that although the two are similar in function, the novel’s categorical framing of the immortal’s claiming of spirits rather than blood separates them somewhat from the rather more facile metaphors of being mere vampires. Niles and DuPris destroy life and take the spiritual essence of their prey, asserting a total domination over their adversaries. These not- vampires differ drastically from the kinds of inversions that we see authors like Gomez and

Butler effecting in The Gilda Stories and Fledgling, respectively. Whereas Black female vampires of the sort described in those novels were meant to critique what Gomez has defined as a metaphor of parasitic theft of somatic vitality that the white male vampires perpetuate,

Barnes’s immortals seem to be more directly in line with the older manifestations of the blood- suckers.

While immortality and transhistorical bodies are a central part of the novel’s speculative dimensions, the metonym of blood is the vehicle by which so much of what the the novel is able to accomplish is carried out. The utility of blood as means to articulate the presence of ancestor- descendant genealogical continua is yet another means by which a species of immortality might be perpetuated. In a way of indirectly signifying on other novels that deal with such themes—

Morrison’s Beloved , Jones’s Corregidora , and Williams’s Dessa Rose to mention but a few—the connection between Black mothers and ability to have children or protect their children is likewise explored in Barnes’s work with the character of Dahlia Childe (whose surname, perhaps, takes on additional significance in light of such a reading).

Dahlia’s plaintive cries of “don’t kill my babies,” become refrain throughout the text, whenever her spirit enters into the narrative present. The drive to protect her children not only outstrips her ability to physically exist (this is what she cries out when Niles and DuPris finally track her down and kill her) but is the force by which she is repeatedly called back into proximity with the world of the living. It is a love, not too dissimilar from that of Beloved or Sethe, which potentially can paradoxically cause problems precisely for those for whom it is intended to protect For instance, when Dahlia’s spirit inhabits the body of one who shares her lineage, the stress of two souls occupying one body generates too much latent energy, and the body quickly overheats to the point of spontaneous combustion. Thus, when Dahlia possesses Austin’s daughter Dolly to warn the family that the forces of Niles and DuPris are getting ready to storm the house in an attempt to kidnap his son, the girl meets with precisely that sort of tragic fate.

Dahlia exists and “lives on” for her children, while Niles (and DuPris) exist by their children. Barnes frames the maternal and patriarchal impulses in the narrative as consummately irreconcilable. But, within the context of the transhistorical Black body, each become read as potentially destructive. For the transhistorical Black male, the life is one of scholarly reclusion and capitalistic exploitation; for his female counterpart, life itself is consumed with the task of protecting the lineage. The novel, most simply, is a commentary on the state of the Black family throughout time.

Because even when Barnes strips away the elements of the fantastic and presents the historical present through the fractured Waites/Childe household, the narrative consistently depicts the various issues that might undermine the ability to maintain a kind of nuclear-family cohesion. The larger transhistorical connections that the novel is invested in exploring is certainly the violence inflicted upon Black bodies by institutional white supremacy; yet it would not be any idle contention to make that Blood Brothers is likewise a means of holding a mirror to

Black families across its interpretation of spacetime and demonstrating the ways that they might be disrupted and split. Of course, such a claim would necessitate a recognition of the matter of agency, and the fact that it is DuPris (and Niles) who repeatedly tear Dahlia’s family asunder, while it is a state sanctioned divorce that dissolves Derek and Rachel’s marriage, subsequent his extralegal cyber-vigilantism as “Captain Africa.” Nevertheless, the presumption of a timelessness of this expressly and explicitly racialized family trauma creates yet another vehicle by which the novel might be interrogated.

In relation to nuclear family’s significance as a means of producing successive generations,

Howard V. Hendrix’s critical reading of immortality in the speculative fiction of Rene Barjavel,

Aldous Huxley, and William Gibson becomes useful here insofar as it broaches the question

surrounding the links between undying human life and the relative fertility/fecundity of humanity. Hendrix explores the matter within the framing metaphor of flowers and fruits: in order for botanical life to reproduce itself, the flowers must inevitably die, in order that the fruits might form. In this schema, the creation of perpetual flowers precludes the biological need for meiosis as a means of reproduction. Hendrix also overlays this approach with an engagement with both Judeo-Christian iconographies of prelapsarian utopia (prior to the eating of the fruit of knowledge), and a highly secularized dystopian iconography through cybernetic apotheosis.

Such readings, though, are helpful in that they provide a way of beginning to interrogate the implicit relationships between immortal parents and the presence and lack of children in their lengthy, transhistorical lives. Barnes, however, would initially seem to be interested in precisely the opposite sort of expression of undying humans and their offspring. For the characters, Niles and DuPris, it is imperative that they have as many children as possible, as the children remain viable in order to serve the ritual of life extension. Children are a valued resource on Bloodroot and exist to be destroyed for the perpetual life of their sires. Yet, the catch is—and indeed, there is one—that while it is so important for children to be born on the plantation, there remains a sort of zero-sum at work in the maintenance of biopower within DuPris’s (and Niles’s) hegemony: most of the children are destroyed by their thirteenth birthday. Before they themselves, in other words, can procreate and start new lines of descent not directly under the masters’ control.

Dahlia, as ever the contrasting paradigm in her alternative transhistorical (disembodied) subjectivity, maintains the myriad family lines that have sprung from her children. In refusing to

“let them kill [her] babies,” the Childe children form restive branches within the family tree. The metaphorical flowers thereupon bear considerable fruit and do their best to survive on their own in spite of the bloodline connections to the monsters at the (blood)roots.

“Please Don’t Kill My Babies”: Dahlia Childe, Descendants, and Persistent Spirits

Blood Brothers works as a text that is a composite of different narratives. There is, of course, the paired narratives of its putative heroes, Derek and Austin, that follow each man on his respective quest towards restitution of personal honor. But equally—arguably more — important in the larger sweep of narrative construction, is the “Journal of Dahlia Childe,” a fictional recollection of key events from the nineteenth century that defined the life of the matriarch of the Childe family (whose descendants would ultimately include both Austin and

Derek’s ex-wife, Rachel). Dahlia, who symbolically attains a kind of immortality through the journal itself, literally persists as well, in the form of a spirit that protects, and potentially can possess, her descendants to attempt to shield them from the depredations of Niles and DuPris.

She persists in spite of the men who took advantage of her in life, and ultimately destroyed her physical body.

But as fascinating as the spectral presence of Dahlia is, her transhistorical textual self is perhaps what elevates the novel to a potentially commensurate stature as other meta-slave narratives. The entries appear in the text as a means of figuratively “possessing” the narrative itself, disrupting plotlines already in progress, and forcing the story to acknowledge the presence of the past. The effect is further compounded by the fact that, although the rest of the novel is told in a kind of free-indirect discourse across the multiple point-of-view characters, the past as chronicled in Dahlia’s journal, is told from a single, first-person narrative voice. In an instance that seems to directly signify on the traditions of the slave narratives, the journal attempts to emphasize its own veracity:

I swear that the things I write here are true. I have no reason to lie—there is too much about me which is soiled by the words on these pages. It is only by telling the truth,

including the truth that brands me a monster, that I can, I hope, establish my own sincerity. (277)

Within this meta-slavery context, however, the efforts in assuring the reader of the truth in the unfolding narrative take on an additional layer of ironic meaning: not only is Dahlia speaking to the horrors of slavery as it was generally and historically experienced, but the text here works to present the fantastic elements as but a part of that larger trauma.

This contiguity between historical and fantastic trauma here hinges upon the significance that the novel as a whole puts upon the issues of lineage and children. Insofar as Blood

Brothers 's work with male immortality is concerned, the perpetuation of individual bodies is at the expense of children, Dahlia's life—and spiritual existence in the aftermath of her murder— exists solely through the children she bears. When she posesses Dee to share her story with the

Waites family and Austin, she explains that they are literally the vessels that carry her forward, and serve as her contact points with the world of the living:

I can only see the things my children have seen,” Dahlia said regretfully. “As I can only enter this world through girl children of my blood, bearing my name, wearing the cloth I wove with my own hair. (233).

The magic that sustains her is in replication, both of her name and of her blood. And while the magic works strongest through what Niles describes as the "Magic of similarity," and links the girl children directly to Dahlia, the novel also makes the reader cognizant of what the boys' role in this genealogy is as well, though framing it in a rather different context.

Dahlia's boys are depicted as being important to her, yes; but they are much more directly connected to DuPris and Niles as their role is vital to the life-extension ritual. Dahlia's journal chronicles the events that led to the death of her first son, Georgie, in graphic, fantastic detail (it is this sequence that necessitates the proleptic insistence of veracity, after all). Two other slaves are sacrificed, and their souls are stolen in the ritual. But because raw souls are dangerous to

consume, they must pass through Georgie first, before DuPris can take them into his body. As

Dahlia's spirit and journal convey the raw information of the ritual to her descendants, Derek interprets and explains the process for Austin:

“Used that boy,” Derek said. “Like a fucking strainer. Used him to purify something that he drew from the other slaves.” “What?” “Energy. That’s too broad a term, but it has to do. I don’t have a better one right now. DuPris stole something from those men that he used to keep himself alive. He needed a child related to him by blood.” (281)

Here again, the novel emphasizes the importance of blood relation for the process of connectivity between the undying(/undead) past and the forestalled future generations. This unshakeable, irresistible genealogical connection to the (dis)embodied past is, writ-small, precisely the kind of connection that the novel is ultimately able to make between the antebellum era and the 1990s.

The novel in its entirety exists in a kind of tension with the notion of a nuclear family as ideal. Certainly Dahlia Childe is incapable, in the face of the institutional racism and omnipresent rape culture of Bloodroot plantation, to do more than aspire towards a family that she can maintain a kind of tenuous custodianship over. 15 But Barnes has her uttering a rather curious pronouncement after the birth of her first son:

But the slave knows that her son’s life will not be his own. That he will not be able to be a man—a slave woman, though degraded, can function as a woman more fully than a male slave can function as a man. The mere attempt and commitment to protect his family could cause his death. I know that the lot of male slaves was one in which there is virtually nothing for them to take pride in, save their children—and the master had complete control over the sanctity of the marital union. (254)

While this claim certainly speaks to the destructive implications of slavery upon the sense of family, I find the gendered essentialism implicit herein to be somewhat troubling in its

15 Derek’s family is separated too, and a major subplot in the first half of the novel is his attempting to rekindle a workable relationship with ex-wife Rachel Waites, nee Childe.

contrasting juxtaposition of the relative lot in the life of bondsmen and -women. The latent biological determinism (“functioning”) of gender roles within the slave community as expressed here clearly articulates a kind of emasculation of bondsmen who cannot protect their nuclear family. But, with the presence of Niles as a counterexample, who by virtue of his ability to claim a kind of “mastery” by his powers that schema becomes dramatically more complicated.

Niles’s experience with slavery is one that is very much in-keeping with bell hooks’s description of complicit masculinities within the apparatus of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. His alignment with DuPris is very much, to use hooks’s terminology, a “dick thing”.

All the more insidious in this alignment is the way that it refigures the concept of “freedom” itself: while Niles is still, de jure , his master’s slave, in the de facto arrangement of their immortality compact on the plantation, he achieves the freedom that institutional racism and misogyny has constructed as “access to patriarchal power” (hooks 90).

Which, on the surface, and per hooks’s schema, would ostensibly make Niles a “man,” as that such a status might epiphenomenologically be understood within that given spacetime.

Although he only claims access to Dahlia’s mind, such a theoretical claim cannot be exercised without practical access to her body. He first meets her in the aftermath of first witnessing just how vast DuPris's hegemonic and magical powers are. She has broken Bloodroot taboo by seeking him out and stealing entry into his sacred space. By proving that she can effectively say the words of power and dance in the style of the ritual, he agrees to take her on as an apprentice.

She accepts with the thought that she might be able to use his power to counterbalance DuPris's domination:

The African grinned. “You learn…quickly,” he said. “You have a mind.” He sniffed at me, at the sweat on my brow, sniffed the place between my legs. “Your people. Do you know where your people came from?” 16 “Charleston?” His laugh was ugly. “Of course you wouldn’t know. But girl—you have the gift. You wish to…” He paused, as if considering his choice of words. “Learn?” “Yes,” I whispered. He walked almost all around me, inspecting. Slowly examining every inch. I stood straight, barely daring to breathe. “You wish to…serve?” he asked. “Yes,” I whispered again. Oh, God, I prayed. Let this be an answer. Please. The African might have been reading my thoughts. “Yes,” he said. “I have use for you. DuPris will hate it.” His grin broadened. “Good.” (297)

The smile signifies that her hopes for any meaningful protection are to be dashed against the unyielding surface of his claims for patriarchal privilege. The African's ability to secure access to

Dahlia is a coup for him as he lays his own sort of claim to her.

“Both are Slave; Both Are Master”: Masculinity, Immortality, and The Body as Historical Text

"The African," perhaps in a not-so-subtle form of signification, is a perpetual exile. Forced from his people and sold into slavery in the 1600s, he becomes a prized servant of DuPris when the white man is made aware of his magical capabilities. As The African tells it, they "own each other"(296). The two form a tense quid-pro-quo alliance that, were it not for both parties' explicit refutation of morality and their mutual complicity in the depredations upon the lives of other human beings for the sake of their own, would make for a fascinating means of undermining the notions of white supremacist patriarchy in a speculative retelling of the colonial and antebellum moments. As it stands, the novel simply renders The African and DuPris as two sides of the same

16 We note that while Dahlia is certainly capable of performing the rites, we note that the question of lineage emerges here as well. That ability in the arcane as The African intends to expose her, is greatly enhanced by the proper bloodline, which is, itself a kind of linkage even further back in Black Atlantic history. One that not even the destructive crucible of the Middle Passage was able to completely sever for her.

pathologized coin: "both are slave. Both are masters" (311). Each struggling for more power , but incapable of relinquishing a dependency upon the other to attain it.

To a certain extent, this relationship has echoes of the one crafted in Octavia Butler’s novel, Wild Seed . In that text, readers are likewise confronted with Black immortality, and in a very similar capacity: Doro and Anyanwu are a pair of perpetual figures whose lives stretch the breadth of centuries and from Africa to America. Doro, like The African, is predatory in his immortal existence, weathering the tides of centuries by swapping bodies with nearby people and killing them in the process. The comparison, though, is complicated somewhat in its executions: while I read The African as existing within a perpetual body , Doro is an entity with a less immediately somatic stability. Indeed, he is occasionally explicitly referenced as a (malignant)

“spirit,” and whatever nigh-indestructible part of him that transmigrates from body to body is more numinal than somatic.

And yet, insofar as Doro’s original somatic does still play a role in his ontological self- identification, he remains consistently identified as both a “he,” and “African”. This, even though he can and does cross phenotypical and physiological boundaries when he transmigrates to temporarily inhabit white and female bodies. And it is that subjective sense of “essential” markers of identity which make him nonetheless a meaningful analogue to Niles. Indeed, the very maleness of these characters and its connections to their desire to dominate and control the central women in their lives—Anyanwu and Dahlia Childe—that makes for the most fruitful and productive site of comparison. Their respective modes of immortality and experiential

“seniority,” create for both of them a vanity that cannot abide by the concept of defiance, least of all by women whom they each take to be comparatively naive in their abilities and capabilities with their own powers.

That vanity, though, renders both Doro and Niles as incapable of predicting the ways that

Anyanwu and Dahlia do undermine and defy them. Butler’s novel has the characters entering into an uneasy truce, but Barnes’s novel provides no such space for mutual recognition. Niles, working with DuPris (with whom he has his own contentious truce), does destroy Dahlia. Her incredibly long-lived body is annihilated near the turn of the twentieth century, and she is, in a strictly physiological sense, dead.

Of course, being dead is hardly the inconvenience it might otherwise be and is far from the end of her story. The sorcerer’s resourceful apprentice, Dahlia has learned more than even her erstwhile master imagined that she would and has gained the ability to interact with the living world from The Other Side. As a spirit, Dahlia can connect, possess, and to a limited extent communicate through those bodies that share her bloodline. The process is taxing on the living body that she inhabits, and the energy expended in the process of possession can cause spontaneous human combustion, as happens to Austin’s daughter (7). But if handled “correctly,” with multiple descendants sharing the load of spiritual connection, Dahlia can speak her wisdom, and thus undermine Niles and DuPris’s machinations.

Here too, the character functions in a rather different way than her analogue in Wild Seed , but the commonality is worth exploring. Like Dahlia, Anyanwu is written as having an intense emotional connection to her generations of descendants, though one that is, it should be noted, strictly emotional (she cannot physically inhabit their bodies or directly link with their spirits).

The male characters in their lives exploit this connection in order to control them. To keep

Dahlia subservient on DuPris’s plantation, he and Niles agree not to sacrifice her children for the life-extension ritual, relying on others of their offspring with others of the bondswomen instead.

The threat that they might , though, keeps her cowed for decades. Doro issues a similar sort of

threat to Anyanwu, making it a general point to both not kill her children in his body swaps, and to more generally make efforts to avoid killing them or commanding them into incestuous relations.

Blood Brothers and Wild Seed present provocative sorts of defamiliarizations within the contexts of their respective work with depicting Black femininity in this way. The dynamics of plantation biopolitics and the assertion of coercive control through narratives of generational terror thematically align the texts’ respective framing of toxic masculinities. And thus, these novels work to suggest an intensely compelling reading of intersectionalism feminist critique of patriarchal oppression.

Within Barnes’s novel, Dahlia, again like Anyanwu (and, perhaps, also like Harriet

Jacobs), is subject to the ubiquitous domination by patriarchy, and stages her generations long battle against the men who transhistorically embody it. And Barnes is entirely willing to frame

Niles, “The African,” as an unabashedly exploitative force. Indeed, in Dahlia’s recollections, she frames their violations of her as one wherein DuPris wants her body, and Niles wanting her mind

(299). The wellspring of immortality on Bloodroot plantation, Niles’s arcane knowledge allows him to force his way into the hierarchy of domination and allows him to become every bit as bad as—if not worse than—DuPris himself. Supernatural elements aside, the novel becomes a thorough means of signifying and re-inhabiting the twice-damned circumstances of the bondswoman, atomized and dominated by two complicit-but-irreconcilable forces of patriarchy, neither of which is capable of recognizing her as a complete subjective entity.

Doubling as motif functions in concert with the larger issue of the transhistorical body as a means of depicting the recursive temporality of the novel’s work with lengthy cycles of historical repetition. The villains bring the atrocities of the past forward and stand poised to destroy the

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future with their mutually corrupting influences. And even in the present, such corruption is already manifest in the Cross/Krause dyad which reflects what Barnes frames as similar mode of self-destructive behavior through the pathologized racial essentialisms. But these mutually destructive recursions of patriarchal racial animus can only be resolved through the potential defined in Derek and Austin. The two are never quite completely amicable with one-another in the manner that Lion’s Blood ’s Kai and Aidan are, but there is nonetheless a kind of mutual recognition of self-consciousness here too. Barnes’s text might be read as suggesting the future possibilities of a corrective species of humanistic universalism that might obviate the need for such antagonistic tribalism.

The bodies of the characters in Lion’s Blood exist in counterhistorical time and space, forcing Barnes’s readers to acknowledge the inherently chronopolitical dimensions of his

Afrofuturism. The body, in the context of Barnes’s racially self-aware alternate history, serves as a canvas for larger narratives indebted to historiographies that stand in flat contradiction to

Hegelian models and Eurocentric silences of African history. The fusions of Black consciousness with Black bodies become a means of upending the narratives of domination and controlling images that saw their genesis in this primal moment of race in American society.

What Lion’s Blood is able to do in the act of creating and asserting a kind of alternate historical presence for Blackness and Black bodies, however, Barnes’s earlier novel, Blood

Brothers , attempts to do with a more familiar American chronology. This novel has many of the same thematic trappings as Lion’s Blood (not least of which being a titular signification on sanguinary semantics), including the formation of an interracial homosocial pair bond between men that inverts Cleaver’s paradigmatic, dichotomous analogy of white is to brain as Black is to body.

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It is, perhaps, helpful to consider what Barnes is able to accomplish within Blood Brothers , by putting the novel in conversation with other texts of Black immortality. Standout texts within the canon of Black Atlantic speculative fictions would certainly include Butler’s Wild Seed ,

Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories , and Tananarive Due’s My Soul to Keep . This chapter addresses each text in turn, but generally speaking, the discourse on Black immortality—the transhistorical Black body, as it has been called by A. Timothy Spaulding—inevitably involves a return to historical time, grounded in the selfsame anti-Hegelian historiography as Barnes’s earlier work with alternate history (Spaulding 103). Blood Brothers and these other novels offer writers a vehicle by which to explore a kaleidoscopic interpretation of Black histories as experienced by single individuals traveling through time.

The wrinkle within this articulation of such transhistorical bodies, though, is that in addition to being undying, they are—with the notable exception of Blood Brothers’ s antagonist,

“The African”—bodies that are gifted with tremendous capacities to heal. Thus, in contrast with

Henderson’s topos of the scar as a signifier of historical somatic trauma, such bodies as are rendered in this subset of Black speculative fiction, heal themselves before such scars can be actualized upon their bodies. Thus, as is the case in Due’s My Soul to Keep , even though the bodies of immortal Black folk can be broken by slavery, temporarily destroyed by historical manifestations of white supremacy, even these catastrophic acts of total violence leave no physical marks upon them. Rather than bearing the physical demarcation of trauma in the form of visible scars then, such characters carry their traumas in their minds and spirits.

By contrast, Barnes’s immortal monster, “The African,” is covered in scars. To the point that some of his twentieth century servant-offspring refer to him solely as, “Scar Man”. These ubiquitous keloid lesions that turn his body into a veritable topographical map of his suffering

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(and the suffering he inflicts ), are further means of marking his body as the transhistorical presence that it is. That these scars are not solely from America but are also evidence of ritual scarification as practiced by the tribe that produced him, further complicates the nature the evidence of his travels through Transatlantic spacetime.

And yet, when the two are destroyed themselves, the rupture of their bodies reflects their thematic separation along the spirit/body axis. DuPris is killed when Austin severs his femoral artery, and he bleeds out; Niles, on the other hand, is killed by the spirit magic of Dahlia Childe, who strikes him a critical blow that frees the myriad souls he had been hoarding within to prolong his life. The latter’s loss of stolen spiritual essence has him rapidly “bleed out” as well, and his heretofore perpetual body is destroyed in the process.

This chapter opened by refiguring the relationship that exists relative to Blackness, bodies, time. In expanding upon Barnes’s oeuvre’s work in rendering the Black body as chronopolitical site of critical reflection on Transatlantic history, I have sought to look at the kinds of immortality proffered by Blood Brothers ’s darkly fantastic plot and characters. The novel melds the fantastic violence of soul-sucking and rending Black “skin and spirit” with the meta-slave narrative of more generalized modes of oppression and domination.

The novel is not unique in its subject matter and reflects many of the conventions of other texts that might be considered meta-slavery texts. Like Butler’s Kindred , its framing of the malingering violence of slavery’s institutionally sanctioned rape and white supremacy. Like

Gomez’s The Gilda Stories , the infusion of magic and the creation of a perpetual Black consciousness serve as a means of attempting to subvert those power structures, through an inversion of traditional metaphors of vampirism, and the theft of essence. Like Hopkinson’s

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Brown Girl in the Ring , the theft of spiritual essence is coded through signifying upon the various supernatural traditions of the African diaspora.

The novel splits its efforts, though, and complicates its understanding of perpetual

Blackness. Male characters—Black as well as white—have access to the magics that forestall death through the sacrifice of life and their own male offspring as “purifiers” of the soul-energy.

The alignment of Niles with DuPris vexes paradigmatic white supremacy by framing “mastery” as the province of those willing to fully embrace patriarchal privilege and render Black femininity as consummately abject. To have the power to forestall death is to have complete power over life (read: Black women) and subsequent generations (read: patrilineality). Insofar as patriarchy is defended, male immortality is assured.

But Blood Brothers ’s work with slavery/enslavement as a site of sociohistorical context helps us to see certain key points about the Black woman’s body as a highly resistant locus in and of itself. In spite of DuPris’s violations and Niles’s psychological terrorism, Dahlia lives on at Bloodroot, effecting a means to protect herself and to forestall their desire to “kill her babies.”

This is at the expense of other lives, unfortunately, and her complicity within the rites that prevent the death of Niles and DuPris, is a scar that persists with her throughout her own extended life. But the novel’s work done in presenting her as a penitent and resourceful Black mother allows critical assessment of her own chronopolitics of resistance: her existence is as much proleptic as her tormentors’ are reflective. She attempts to relinquish her own selfhood to protect her children, who embody her own sense of personal (Afro)future.

This even after the point of her own death. Dahlia makes use of the tools of the African’s trade—the magic of similarity—to become a spiritual guardian for her descendants. So long as

Niles and DuPris stalk the earth, she persists as a means of countering their transhistorical

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antebellum destruction. There are risks inherent in this approach: evoking some of the concerns in Morrison’s Beloved , Dahlia might be read as loving “too much,” and bringing about the fiery death of certain of her female descendants. But as a means of combating the aligned forces of toxic masculinity, the approach seems to be one that she (and the novel itself) deems worth that risk.

It is the presence of Derek and Austin, however, that complicates this otherwise neatly framed dyadic mode of gendered narrative construction. Where the novel could easily be a highly functional feminist critique in the vein of bell hooks’s intersectional analyses of the histories of Black masculinity, Barnes’s positioning of the two contemporary male figures as the means to ultimately end the transhistorical rampage of their shadowy antebellum analogues. True enough that Niles as the Big Bad cannot be stopped by either Derek (lack of physical strength) or

Austin (who was wounded fighting DuPris in a John Brownian mode of internecine white-on- white violence), and that it is Dahlia who expunges him from the post-Emancipation world; however, that that process could only be facilitated by the actions of the male heroes is certainly cause for further speculation as to what the novel’s politics might truly be.

All the same, the novel’s meta-slavery endeavors create a significant commentary on the connections that bind the Black past and present. Its utility of transhistorical Black bodies and spirits as a means of unpacking the gendered dynamics of how Blackness as somatic and ontological fact function is a helpful means of addressing the lacuna of Black femininity in

Barnes’s canon.

Conclusion

While Barnes came onto the mass-market, genre fiction scene with the publication of a series of works visibly indebted to the traditions of science fiction, his work in the latter years of

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the 1990s tacked a discernible skew away from this approach. The 1993 end of the Aubry Knight cycle, whilst coincidental with a more general decline of the cyberpunk methodological approaches it seemed to be most directly in conversation with, saw him return to genre conventions perhaps more in line with speculative fiction more broadly, and dark fantasy more specifically. There are, of course, outliers on both sides of this comparatively arbitrary dividing line of his canon (e.g. The Kundalini Equation as a darkly fantastic novel written in 1982, and the Star Trek novelization, Far Beyond the Stars in 1995); but we would be reasonably well- served to look at Barnes’s solo projects at this point as indicative of the actualization of the stated "career shift" that began in 1989 with the publication of Gorgon Child .

But even as the form of his novels changed, the function that they did in their critical investigation of the somatic, Blackness, and masculinity, did not. There are meaningful through- lines connecting works as disparate as the cyberpunk hellscapes of Aubry and the Scavengers to the paradoxically quotidian/fantastic spaces of 90s-era Los Angeles that are stage and set- dressing for Blood Brothers , and 1998’s Iron Shadows (and, to a lesser extent, 2000’s

Charisma ). Blood Brothers and Iron Shadows present a shared narrative “universe” that will be unpacked in detail throughout this chapter, but to that discussion, I would propose adding The

Kundalini Equation , as I hold that it represents a kind of prototypical methodology of thematic engagement that the latter two novels of a decade-plus later would refine and build upon.

In each of these texts, the confluence of spirit and psyche is the somatic, which derives and shares power from and with the other subjective facets. The body, in Blood Brothers in particular, is a site of enduring and persistence, even in spite of the corrupting influences (and psycho-somatic scarrings) of the history of human bondage. Bodies that come into contact with the institution of slavery, even indirectly, are marked by it, and exist within a timeline that is

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socially circumscribed by this phenomenon. Of course, such markings are relative, and take on different dimensions, contingent upon race, gender, and class. But Blood Brothers and its related dark fantasy texts cousins in Barnes’s canon, take this bodily marking as a foundational point, and the histories explored herein have gravity because of the defamiliarizing visibility they represent through these somatic overdeterminations.

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CHAPTER 4

APOCALYPSE NOW:

IRON SHADOWS AND AFROASIAN BODIES AS HISTORICAL TEXTS

The accomplishment of Japan has been to realize the meaning of European aggression on the darker peoples, to discover the secret of the white man’s power, and then without revolutionary violence is change her whole civilization and attitude toward the world, so as to emerge in the twentieth century the equal in education, technique, health, industry and art of any nation on earth. W. E. B. Du Bois “What Japan Has Done”

Introduction

In the final pages of Steven Barnes’s 1998 novel, Iron Shadows , he figuratively tips his hand and makes plain the extent of the linkages between that text and the work it serves as spiritual successor to, Blood Brothers . Niles, “The Scarred Man,” had apparently traveled quite far afield in the centuries of his wandering after being liberated from Bloodroot plantation, and his perpetual travels between being separated from Dahlia Childe in the nineteenth century and being destroyed by her spirit in the 1990s, Barnes writes that he had occasion to stop in Japan.

There, upon meeting and having a tryst with a local woman who had survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and realizing that she was “special,” the two produced a pair of twins whose Black and Japanese background would serve as a means of catalyzing momentous change in the world as they knew it (397).

This chapter transitions from the preceding discussion of Blood Brothers ’s transhistorical meta-slavery, to a discussion of the work that Iron Shadows is doing in forcing an engagement with alternative dimensions of the somatic fact of Blackness as a global issue. Whereas Blood

Brothers uses a speculative form of Black life existing external to the mortal boundaries of historical moments to dig deeper into the connections that link Afrodiasporic pasts and presents

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within the Transatlantic world, Iron Shadows works to “un-silence” the lived realities of Black people in Transpacific spaces. The work that follows here, takes an analytical approach towards applying Barnes’s brand of metaphorically embodied history to read the Iron Shadows as participant in a kind of AfroAsian reframing of history and identity construction.

The narratives in Iron Shadows ultimately work to stage a twofold countermemory exercise in the chronopolitics of Blackness in Asia. First, I address the ways that the novel picks up on the implications of the Black soldier in Asia—Japan, Vietnam, and (to a more abstracted degree) Korea—as a means of exploring the impact and experiences of Black bodies that have become texts for mapping the atrocities and traumas of American martial Orientalism. The Black male protagonist of the novel, Jackson “Jax” Carpenter, becomes an embodied sign of the numerous Black soldiers whose existence at the forefront of American imperial engagement in the region through invasion and occupation becomes an historicized point of connection with the peoples of the continent. I read the novel’s work with Jax’s memories of that traumatic history as a key element of Barnes’s work with Black bodies in Iron Shadows .

The second facet of Blackness and Black bodies that I explore in relation to Iron Shadows ’ work in creating a fantastical meditation on Transpacific notions of race and ethnicity, is situated in my reading of Niles’s Black-Japanese offspring, the Oshita twins. Joy and Tomo Oshita serve the double task of being both the novel’s most visible antagonists, and its most readily discernible physical manifestation of AfroAsian historical convergence. Their very existence in the novel allows Barnes to do some important work in identifying anti-Blackness as an ideology with global dimensions and forces the reader to confront that history of complicated hierarchical dynamism within white supremacy’s cross-cultural manifestations. Coding these characters as potential pariahs within both Japan and the US, Barnes engages in critical work surrounding

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issues of just what exactly a Black body can mean and look like when taken beyond the purview of the Middle Passage’s historical overdeterminations. I supplement these readings of Black-and-

Asian bodies Iron Shadows with references to other works in Barnes’s oeuvre—1993’s

Firedance (which will be discussed in considerably greater detain in the chapters to come), and

2017’s Twelve Days —as a means of further exploring the implications of his work in crafting a literature of Transpacific Blackness.

Ultimately, this chapter proposes to create a coordinate map, playing with topographies of cultures and histories. The past/present temporal dynamics of Afrofuturism function as one axis of variables, hinging upon memory and embodied history. Meanwhile, the spatial dynamics of racial epiphenomena as seen through the juxtaposition of Afrodiaspora (qua Black Atlantic) and

AfroAsia constitute the other axis.

Towards a Black Pacific: AfroAsia as Methodology in Imagining Polycultural Connections

AfroAsia as framework for exploring such a potentiality is thoroughly in-keeping with the recursive valences of Afrofuturism. Both frameworks are indebted to an understanding of the past, and its inextricable entanglements with present and future. AfroAsia in its entirety rests upon the notion of polyculturalism 17 , which holds that “people live coherent lives that are made up of a host of lineages” and that “the task of the historian is not to carve out lineages but to make sense of how people live culturally dynamic lives” (Prashad xii). And Afrofuturism presents a means and method of engaging with the task of, as Kodwo Eshun describes it, politicizing the very notion of time itself and the spaces wherein Black people can exist within its

Einsteinian multidimensionality, is grounded in an understanding of recursion and prolepsis

17 Here reading Robin D. G. Kelley’s concept as interpreted by Vijay Prashad in Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting (xi).

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(289). Such a fusion of means of recognizing and reconciling with the past means also allowing for its inherent polyculturalism as a means of pushing back against a Hegelian chronopolitics of ethno-racial compartmentalization.

So as much as Afrofuturism adds to an understanding of the dynamic nature of history as abstracted, defamiliarized, and allegorized upon the canvas of future imaginary, AfroAsia as corrective worldview likewise depends upon a re-engagement with the past as a means of growing the reciprocal literacies of polyculturalism. AfroAsia shares a discursive genealogy with

Mullen’s other project in defining Transpacific identities for people of color: Afro-Orientalism.

Afro-Orientalism asks that scholars, artists, and writers take pains to understand the complicated and layered dimensions of Black American views on Asia. Whereas Said would hold that the apex manifestation of Euro-American imperial power rests in the ability to render Asian alterity as both unknowable and yet perpetual object of study, Mullen asks that we consider the vexed space of Black folk within the apparatus of “the West.” As Mullen defines the term:

Afro-Orientalism is a counterdiscourse that at times shares with its dominant namesake certain features but primarily constitutes an independent critical trajectory of thought on the practice and ideological weight of Orientalism in the Western world. Afro- Orientalism in other words, is a signifying discourse on race, nation, and global politics constituting a subtradition in indigenous US writing on imperialism, colonialism, and the making of capitalist empire. (xv)

A matrix of shifting positionalities of power vis-a-vis other nonwhite Others necessitates the commentary intrinsic to Mullen’s project of reading Asia from the perspective of Black America.

Iron Shadows does considerable work in demonstrating the conundrum of Afro-

Orientalism in its depictions of Jax’s interactions with the Viet Cong during his tour of duty in the Vietnam War, but the tension between Black and Asian identities within the ubiquitous presence of global white supremacy persists well into the latter decades of the twentieth century.

While scholars like Deborah Elizabeth Whaley interrogate a generalized prevalence of “racial

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skinning” and “performing Orientalism” in hip hop music videos (191), and the “kung-fusion” of

Black-and-Asian films like R omeo Must Die (198) , the specific implications of hip hop artists like the Wu-Tang Clan typify the complicated cultural dialogues between Black folk and the various peoples of Asia. The Wu-Tang Clan—a collective of nine rap artists from the Staten

Island borough of New York City—perform a kind of engagement with East Asian cultural practices and traditions by sampling music and dialogue from both Hong Kong martial arts cinema and Japanese jidaigeki (or “period piece”) cinema. The argument about appropriation versus appreciation in their art is one that has been the subject of critique, both scholarly and artistically (Mullen xxvii).

And yet, while it would be easy to lump Black American engagement with the Asian

Pacific Rim beneath the larger rubric of more generalized Western Orientalism, I would second

Mullen’s assertions that there is considerably more at stake in the Black/Asian exchange than measuring who is more complicit in objectifying the other per the malingering metrics of spectral colonialist rhetorics. As Mullen and other scholars indicate, things come back to the matter of historicizing, and more specifically, historicizing connectivity and commonality. Framed thusly, as point of collaborative exercise and actively resisting the potential Scylla and Charybdis of cultural appropriation and effacement of the significant core of strategically essentialist “Afro- ness” at the heart of both AfroAsia and Afrofuturism, I would contend that the discursive modes stand with much to offer one another relative to their respective modes of critical inquiry. This, as pertinent specifically to mecha as SF mode, inasmuch as it speaks to an apparent through-line of commonality vis-à-vis the ambivalent status of the nonwhite body at its most directly engaged with “technology” as a globalized manifestation of a particular kind of cognitively estranged modernity. AfroAsia, as conceived by Mullen and musician/scholar Fred Ho, creates a helpful

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articulation of Transpacific spatial geography to overlay the temporal dimensions posed by

Afrofuturism. It might thus be understood to offer exactly the kind of revolutionary spacetime which posits a meaningful trajectory for Black futures to investigate.

In the coordinate spacetime of Afrofuturist AfroAsia as methodology, Iron Shadows and its

SF counterpart, Firedance , reflect a chronopolitical means of imagining Blackness and “Asian- ness” as manifest in the speculative bodies in both past and future. The bodies in these novels, and Twelve Days as well, challenge whitewashed narratives of temporality that otherwise attempt to circumscribe their potential with the construction of a narrative history that can elide, obfuscate, and otherwise mitigate their status as part of agential subjectivities. Each novel represents a separate and quite distinct vector for historical engagement. Firedance, on the one hand, presents a depiction of the potential conflicts, trials, and ultimate triumphs of a direct engagement with that past in the context of a Black mecha AfroAsian futurescape. On the other hand, Iron Shadows engages with the toxic ramifications of a silenced past and the blocking of

AfroAsian memory.

Steven Barnes’s AfroAsian Somatic Synthesis: Transpacific Black Embodiment and Historical Cross-Cultural Imaginations

But, as always, to go forward, we must look back: nearly three-quarters of a century before

Barnes would pen Iron Shadows , W. E. B. Du Bois would produce his own AfroAsian speculative fiction with the novel, Dark Princess (1928). Within the novel, Du Bois imagines a cabal of influential figures representing the global dimensions of the “Color Line”. Literally stumbling in among these conspirators for a worldwide upending of the myriad forms of white supremacy, is Matthew Townes, a Black American man, who ultimately charts a new future for the peoples of the segregated and colonized worlds we he falls in love with Kautilya, the eponymous royal, and leader-in-exile of an Indian state agitating for independence from the

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British Raj. The two share an off-and-on romance, but overcome a variety of social hurdles to consummate their love and produce a child together. Upon the body of this AfroAsian scion of royal blood, Du Bois projects a liberationist future of Black and Brown people: “Messenger and

Messiah to all the Darker Worlds” (311).

The novel itself represents the latent potentiality for organized and coalitionist resistance against global white supremacy that suffused much of Du Bois writings on the place of Black

Americans within the context of nascent nationalisms across the colonized world. Such transnational aims of repudiation of Euro-American global domination would see practical fruition in the form of the Bandung Conference of 1955 18 , but the novel prefigures theory for that movement by over two decades. In Dark Princess , Du Bois sought to wrestle with the status of various manifestations of politicized Blackness within and without the American nation that might enable and facilitate a comparable sort of drive to self-determination to those of Indian,

Chinese, Egyptian, and Japanese movements (18). But what I find to be most immediately fascinating about the novel’s attempts to explore these themes of empowerment, nationalism, history, and identity is the way that they are all framed through the narrative significance of the child himself, as though the confluent genealogies within this body itself, and the very ontological fact of its existence is enough to concretize the myriad inchoate notions that surround it.

This embodied hybridity as a means of signifying a shared agenda against global white supremacy and colonialism is something that is suggested in Iron Shadows as well . In light of

Barnes’s fiction’s preoccupation with the body as a site of history, such an expression of somatic

18 Which, itself, figures prominently in Coates’s 2017 Black Panther miniseries, Black Panther & The Crew . In integrating the mid-twentieth century anticolonial conference into the fictive history of the armored Black hero, the comic series might likewise be read as further suggesting a kind of Transpacific Afrofuturist historiography.

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signification on cross-cultural exchange perhaps stands to reason. But whereas Du Bois articulates the AfroAsian body as a site of ecstatic optimism for the shape of things to come,

Barnes’s readings are a bit more ambivalent in their representational methodologies. Not least because, in both novels in question the Black/Asian hybrid bodies are initially presented as antagonistic presences. Subtextually, though, in Iron Shadows (and in Firedance and Twelve

Days ), multiracial Black/Asian bodies are significant narrative devices because they highlight the heretofore silenced history of Transpacific connections, which is itself complicated beyond facile moralizing. In engaging with not simply matters of ascendant nonwhite nationalism(s), but also with the vexed legacy of Black involvement in American wars in Asia (whether in Japan, Korea, or Vietnam), Barnes expects his readers to confront the legacies of a Black American/Asian- national interaction in a manner that pushes well beyond the DuBoisean calls for unity among the so-called “darker races.”

This theoretical approach becomes considerably more legible through the application of

Mullen and Ho’s take on the concept AfroAsia. Ho’s rather substantial definition of the concept places it as “a strategic intersection for thinking through an internationalist, global paradigm that joins the world’s two largest continents and populations, as well as an anti-imperialist, insurgent identity that is no longer majority white in orientation” (2-3). More specifically, in the context of my own research, AfroAsia is a theoretical intervention that allows for assessing the comparative framing of Black American and Japanese reciprocal takes on sociohistorical phenomena and SF tropes. I hold that there is substantial insight to be garnered here, particularly as it relates to a study of the potentiality of reading the other epistemologies in relationship with future imaginings of the body.

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Reading the Scars and Unveiling the Trauma: Iron Shadows and the Bodily Recuperation of an AfroAsian Past

What I find to be such an important aspect of reading AfroAsian narratives of speculative fiction is that they likewise manage to address the significance of the body as a site of historical enaction. Igarashi Yoshikuni, in Bodies of Memory , focuses on a “materiality of memory” that frames a reading of Japan’s post-WWII past explicitly through the use of the somatic, by reading memories of the wartime trauma through bodily tropes as discursive locus for physical manifestations of memory (3). We might find this to be a productive analogue for the work that

Henderson is doing with Black bodies as somatic texts to recall the scarring histories of

Afrodiasporic trauma. Whether the body is marked by bombs, radiation, whips, or brands the parallel brutalities of alternate incarnations of global white supremacy become legible through the scars as somatic history.

But while the nonwhite bodies in question are harmed by the historical manifestations of racialized trauma, it is likewise fascinating to explore the ways in which they sometimes find means to utilize those same bodies as a means of fighting back. In the case of Steven Barnes’s particular body of AfroAsian fiction, as fellow Black speculative fictionist, Charles R. Saunders, has noted this is accomplished through the ubiquitous element of martial artistry (400). Indeed,

Barnes’s creation of a “world of kung fu wherein nonwhite people dream of a revolution of bare fists against the heavily armed fortress of white supremacy,” very nearly anticipates the core elements of Prashad’s Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting (xii). Martial arts in Iron Shadows highlight polycultural connectivity between various modes of Asian cultural practice and the embodied Black subjects has been a part of his speculative world-building in one way or another from very early on. Streetlethal introduced readers to the kinesthetic sensibilities of protagonist

Aubry Knight’s nullboxing in 1983, but 1984’s The Kundalini Equation would focus much more

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directly, overtly, and extensively upon the study of Asian fighting forms as a means of asserting a very potent balance between mind and body. These moves to represent the martial arts would continue to serve as substrate for Barnes’s exploration of embodied subjectivity up through his most recent novel, Twelve Days, (itself a sequel to The Kundalini Equation , some thirty-plus years after the fact) . Iron Shadows ’s reference the real-world syncretic Black American take on the Japanese art of karate, the Black Karate Federation (BKF), is quite in line with the pervasive significance of this particular line of Transpacific synthesis in Barnes’s work. 19 Such signifying on latent polycultural connections through martial arts is but one facet of my reading of Barnes’s oeuvre as uniquely situated at an intersecting theoretical framework of the embodied

Transpacific history that his characters represent.

The battles against white supremacy, however valiant, do, invariably leave the scars of oppression and intractable manifestations of domination. Indeed, when scaled up as a battle between nations, the technologized edge of militarized whiteness can leave scars wide enough to consume not merely bodies, but entire cities, as was the case with the traumatic instances of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 (29). We might, for the purposes of establishing conceptual commonality, make the case that a similar sort of

“Armageddon Effect” sets the stage for twentieth century Japanese speculative fictions as well, insofar as the nation’s current status vis-a-vis Western (read: white) imperialistic militarism likewise suggests a post-post-apocalyptic coding.

19 Before a sparring match with one of the Oshita’s entourage, Cat provides exposition about her particular style of martial arts. Explaining that her craft is BKF-style (Black Karate Federation), she talks through the irony of her being a white woman practicing a Black variant of a Japanese martial art: “When I was LAPD, a couple Black officers used to go down and train with the brothers. As a joke, they took me along once…I liked it” (332). In so doing, the novel continues its motif of unveiling and un-silencing, by calling attention to the real BKF, an historical institution founded in 1969 by Grandmaster Steve Muhammad and a cohort of other Black martial artists, living in Los Angeles at the time (Aziz). The novel goes on to describe Cat’s BKF battle tactics in the exacting detail that Barnes’s hand for verbalizing the kinesthetic is wont.

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But Iron Shadows ’s plot makes a direct engagement with the visual representations of this apocalyptic recurrence by framing its climactic showdown as a rather direct signification upon the trope of the bomb. Subsequently, an establishing action sequence highlights the competency and fighting prowess of the two gun-for-hire-cum-private-investigator heroes, Jax Carpenter and

Posche “Cat” Juvell, who are swept up in the case of rescuing a presumably kidnapped heiress from the Golden Sun cult. The cult itself is led by the twins—Tomo and Joy Oshita—who are of mixed Black and Japanese ancestry and lead their followers through a series of highly public demonstrations of their miraculous powers. These are no mere theatrical stunts, though, and the twins are possessed of actual psionic abilities that allow them to either fully heal the faithful with a touch, blow apart enemies with telekinetic energy bursts, or invade the minds of sleeping people and destroy them from within. To truly thwart the ambitions of the twins (who have designs on visiting the full extent of their destructive powers known to the inhabitants of the city of Los Angeles in an eschatological revelation, which they call “The Unveiling”), Cat and Jax must kill them in a climactic showdown. Joy, in particular, becomes a living embodiment of destructive potential that is not unlike a walking atomic inferno: “Light erupted from her body.

When she slammed people out of her way, their singed and flaming bodies flew like wind- whipped embers…the glow of Joy’s force field grew until it resembled a fire-tinged tsunami,”

(387).

In Iron Shadows , Barnes uses his work with the bodies of the twins as a means to engage with ontological and somatic manifestations of the fact of AfroAsian-ness. On a superficial level, the novel is an adventure that follows a cadre of private investigators seeking to rescue an heiress from the clutches of a mysterious cult. But beneath the veneer of action-movie fireworks, however, the novel also works as a commentary on the nature of racialized identity within the

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Transpacific space. There is a layering, that occurs in Iron Shadows that overtly seeks to doubly

Otherize these twins: their bodies are marked by the implicit histories of marginalization of both

Black and Japanese peoples in the twentieth century, and as such, they reveal identities exist at the crossroads of global manifestations of systemic white supremacy.

But the theme of revelation 20 in AfroAsian historical somatics is perhaps best articulated in a line that is repeated throughout Iron Shadows , to the point of nearly becoming a refrain: “See, and Believe.” There is a lot at stake in this relatively terse three-word phrase, and it is perhaps a more than adequate space to start the analysis of the historical somatic that undergirds so much of the novel’s project, vis-a-vis identity and the fantastic constructions. The overt significance is that the characters who most frequently utter this phrase are gifted with nearly miraculous powers that the convince thousands of followers to “see, and believe” what they are capable of.

As biracial Black-and-Japanese children scarred by the atomic bomb and history itself, the

Oshitas demanding that the people in the novel “see” them, also works as a kind of metatextual revisionist historiography. Barnes as author is presenting the shadowy racialized past that the twins represent for his readers to “see, and believe” the global and historical dimensions of anti-

Black racism.

In a manner anticipating the processes of historical un-silencing that his project in Lion’s

Blood would again revisit some six years later, Iron Shadows works by staging a kind of sensorial appeal to the reader’s historical (mis)understandings and (mis)remembrances, forcing a confrontation with the convenient historiographical ellipses that leave marginalized peoples on the outside. By exploring how this process works in Iron Shadows , and the particular way in

20 This is occasionally also framed as “unveiling,” particularly in the context of the twins public demonstration of their true apocalyptic forms (314).

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which AfroAsian somatic presences are represented herein, we can lay a foundation to begin further exploration of how such representational methodologies work in the proleptic imaginaries of texts like Firedance . In order to look forward towards a kind of Black mecha AfroAsian

Futurism, it is helpful to reflectively “see” the historical processes of transpacific racialization, that we might “believe” where Barnes’s speculations can and do take us.

The racial dimensions of Japan’s position in World War II, and specifically in the lead-up to the incandescent advent of the atomic age, should be neither ignored, nor actively silenced, and a reading of Iron Shadows in conversation with, for example, John Dower’s War without

Mercy , underscores as much. Connecting the past to the then-present, Dower writes:

To a conspicuous degree, the racial and racist ways of thinking which had contributed so much to the ferociousness of the war were sublimated and transformed after August 1945. The merciless struggle for control of Asia and the Pacific gave way, in a remarkably short time, to an occupation in which mercy was indeed displayed by the conquerors, and generosity and goodwill characterized many of the actions of victor and vanquished alike. That vicious racial stereotypes were transformed, however, does not mean that they were dispelled. They remained latent, capable of being revived by both sides in times of crisis and tension. In US-Japan relations, this was readily apparent by the 1980s, when rising economic tensions between the two countries prompted the resurrection of crude racial images and invectives on both sides. (13-14)

Arguably, the very source of the Orientalist tension that cyberpunk (and adjacent) texts like

Firedance and Barnes’s earlier collaborative novel, The Descent of Anansi, skirt around, can be traced back through a history that, rife with sublimated tension and racial animus, would be difficult to either see, or believe. Indeed, the anxieties of the Japanese postwar economic resurgence, the overt hostilities during the Pacific War itself, and the catalyzing moment of the end of the Russo-Japanese War in which a European nation was bested by a nonwhite people in military combat, create a through-line by which Japanese alterity is rendered and encoded as

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consummately inscrutable and perpetually suspect. This suggests a history of Western conflict with the semiotic ghost of Japanese racial otherness.

The cognitive wrestling being undertaken here between seeing and believing implies that the novel is likewise urging readers to consider the importance of memory. Throughout Iron

Shadows , memory and suppression become crucial points for all of the characters involved to reconcile. A point that works in productive contrast to the narrative’s play with the somatic, as even though Cat and Jax are at the peak of their physical performance capabilities, they are both nonetheless frequently compromised by the mental walls (and, as will be discussed below, physical walls too on occasion), that they have thrown up to block off instances in the past that are complicated, problematic, or otherwise traumatic for them to face. As a result, this novel too is an instance of Barnes presenting the motif of embodied subjectivity as a vital point of actualizing selfhood in the face of the challenges along its heroes’ journey. We see the protagonists encountering stymying manifestations of their pasts again and again: Cat in her repressed memories of domestic trauma inflicted by her father upon her half-brother and Jax in his remembered trauma of his time as a soldier in Vietnam during the American military incursion there.

Jax’s past role as a soldier is—like his personal relationship with Cat—revealed gradually and elliptically. The novel foreshadows the importance of a “wall” in his memories, that blocks his ability to fully engage with his own past—that is, to “see and believe.” The wartime atrocities for him are so traumatic as to become deeply repressed within his subconsciousness by this

“wall,” which is a haunting and psychical manifestation of an actual “wall” made of the bodies of his compatriots by the Viet Cong, in the aftermath of a preventable ambush. While Jax was checking one of the many tunnels dug by the VC, Jax is trapped underground when a grenade

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collapses the tunnels. After digging himself out, he encounters a horrifying truth: “The VC had not simply slaughtered his platoon. They had butchered the Americans, then stacked the resultant dismembered bodies like cordwood…no attempt had been made to hide this deed. This cairn of the dead was intended to be found, intended to inspire awe, and fear” (254). After surviving the attack, Jax returns to American-held territory, and is able to physically recuperate; however, “as his body healed, his mind erected a wall around the things that had happened, and what he had done in the forest to survive” (256). The physical “wall” of corpses he left in Vietnam years past and the psychical “wall” of repression become conflated in Jax’s mind, merging bodies, trauma, and history through active and passive blocking of his memories. It is only when he finds himself once again buried alive after surviving a psychokinetic attack by Tomo Oshita in a cave, that must not only confront this trauma, but relive it as he fights to escape. In so doing, he is flung back across Transpacific spacetime—in an instance of sankofarration, he regains consciousness in a tunnel, only to have to ask himself directly, “which tunnel?” unsure of whether he is reliving his past or experiencing it again in the present—and made to reconnect with the wages of imperialistic war, and reckon with the role that he played within it (256).

This consideration of Jax as an American soldier in Vietnam meaningfully contrasts with the personal histories of the Oshita twins. Jax represents one kind of embodied manifestation of a racialized view of the Pacific. Doing so facilitates an understanding of the fuller scope of

Barnes’s work with Blackness and Black bodies as epiphenomenal and historically legible means of un-silencing the past. While Cat and Jax signify on the American Black-white racial polemic

(here played out in their interracial relationship as former spouses), Joy and Tomo’s characterization compels us to look further afield than that potentially facile dichotomy. The twins are born of the corrupting influence of American military aggression against imperial

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Japan; and as such, they are always-already understood as reflecting a liminal sort of repudiation of racial essentialism. The novel relates in their past that they are both the products of an initial upbringing that is culturally Japanese. But at the same time, the “fact of Blackness” pervades the way that they were reared; and, rather than serving as a means of unifying them across the arbitrary distinctions of race and ethnicity (in a DuBoisean utopia), their embodied multiraciality casts them initially as pariahs, both in Japan and in the US, where the ultimately move.

This is most directly conveyed in excerpt from a “file” composed by Tomo Oshita, as one of the novel’s inclusions of supplemental text that work to create a sense of “factual” historicity

(not unlike the inclusions of excerpts from the Journal of Dahlia Childe in Blood Brothers ). In the reflective excerpt, Tomo opens up about his experiences as a biracial child growing up in postwar Japan.

If I could have asked the world a boon, it would have been to be born a normal child, without the powers and abilities that mark me as an outsider in any company. If I could have been given a second gift, it would be to have been born Black. Or Japanese. Either of these. But to be forever between has been to belong nowhere, and to no one. To be alone. Just me, and Joy, and Mother (314)

The pervasive sense of isolation articulated within the document, is one thing. But the novel goes a step further in Tomo’s subsequent elaborations about what being kokujin (黒人 , literally,

“Black Person”) means within the context of Japanese society. We note, for one thing, that the

Japanese-language term here is one that does not allow for the semiotics of biraciality: it simply and flatly categorizes him as Other, highlighting a very Fanonian “fact of Blackness.” The novel goes on to further elaborate on the pariah status that being thus racially Othered means for them, by using language like “less than totally human,” “products of our mother’s shame,” and

“abomination” (314-15).

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There is a remarkably similar sort of commentary on embodied Black/Asian history in

Barnes’s most recent novel, Twelve Days . Here, too, there is a highly powerful antagonistic figure whose expository conveyance of backstory and genealogy likewise reveal elements of an

AfroAsian past: Indra Gupta, the Afro-Indian leader of the novel’s own evil doomsday cult, the

Golden Dream. A flashback sequence explains that she is a member of the Siddhi ethnic subgroup in India—descended from Bantu peoples brought as slaves from Africa across the

Indian Ocean (236). Further paralleling Tomo’s narrative, Gupta’s childhood was also one of pariah status: her high-caste Brahmin mother married her Siddhi father and was disowned from her family as a result (237). When her parents are ultimately murdered by the other townsfolk,

Gupta takes it upon herself to learn as much in the way of yogic traditions, martial arts, and other means to found a cult with the power to disrupt global politics. She is a Siddhi with spiritual, economic, and physical powers to change the world in her pursuit of vengeance upon it.

So in Barnes’s work, the ontological and somatic facts of AfroAsian genetic merging are hardly enough to make for a truly revolutionary subversion of trenchant manifestations of racial thinking on a global stage. The scars of racial animus are inflicted irrespective of national or cultural context, and the bodies that exist as marked by these traumas will invariably find a means to literally fight back by whatever martial arts or psychokinetic means necessary. And as such, the mode of representation of the racial alterity in these novels suggests the kind of horizontal connection that Michelle Wright frames as means of pushing beyond the epistemology of circumscribing Blackness within the Transatlantic basin. With Barnes’s indication that the nature of genetic proximity to Blackness is comparable irrespective of whether within the

Transatlantic, Transpacific, or Indian Ocean contexts, Blackness resonates as being an ontological epiphenomenon that recurs across different spacetimes. As such, the novels’ work in

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un-silencing the histories of parallel hierarchies by addressing the various Black bodies underscoring the larger significance of implied AfroAsian connections.

In spite of their evident pariah status within the epiphenomena of Blackness as they experience it growing up, Joy, Tomo, and Indra Gupta as well become capable of reversing the polarity—from repulsion to attraction—of their racial identities through charisma and psycho- spiritual powers. The Golden Sun and Golden Dream cults demonstrate that these AfroAsian bodies draw people unto them, not simply because of the fact that they exist in a DuBoisean,

Dark Princess vein, but instead because of their ability to craft and perform a charismatic polycultural spirituality. In other words, even though they represent the explosive potential of atomic proportions, when they direct their energies towards syncretic connections, rather than towards destructive severance, they find the potential of a kind of acceptance by a global community. Thus, the existence of an AfroAsian somatic presence in Barnes’s novels is complemented by the processes of syncretizing a host of religious traditions (ideologies), including Shinto and various indigenous African practices (93). The “theology” behind Iron

Shadows ’s Golden Sun cult is an amalgamation of a welter of global spiritualities, but works in praxis as a means of facilitating psycho-somatic mindfulness (including an extended part of the narrative that has Cat and Jax explore the cult’s focus on that sort of anti-Cartesianism through the act of sexual intercourse). We see, then, Barnes taking the characterization in the direction of effacing dualisms here too: the twins’ power springs from a place that is literally psychical and somatic.

The narrative significance of the twins’ AfroAsian somatic presence is documented through a series of fictional “research files,” documenting the events recounted by the Oshita’s mother, Tomiko, a one-time Japanese scientist serving in Nagasaki in the latter days of the

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Second World War. Historicizing the children and their mother’s bodies (and using those bodies as manifestation of this history), the files contextualize them through a chronicle of violence and trauma that she endured in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of the city and the presence of

American occupation forces (265). Diegetically, Tomiko also conveys some of this information to the twins, but not all of it. Enough to stoke a latent desire for revenge against the indistinct forms of “the killers” (read: US military forces) and the eponymous “Iron Shadows,” which is the grand ends towards which they are meant to unleash a psionic apocalypse. In having such an incomplete historical narrative, and no direct way to access memories of the events that precipitated their birth, the twins fail to see the full extent of what is at stake in their mother’s plan.

And yet they embody so much of the social circumstances directly derived from that history. Joy and Tomo are born as conjoined twins. Subsequent their birth, they are surgically separated, resulting in a moment of primal scarring that defines the rupture of their initial moment of connectivity (81). It is, perhaps, no mere quirk of plot happenstance that the doctor who cleaves the two is a white American officer in the Occupation. Indeed, the manifestation of technological harm being inflicted upon nonwhite bodies here is likewise a point of commonality for the utility of mecha as SF methodology of addressing historical trauma. Whereas the discourse of technological ambivalence rendered in the Japanese mecha texts is understood as a method of engaging the past as a site of atomic holocaust and the excesses of ultranationalist militarism, Black mecha presents a potential site for revisiting the narratives of historical harm inflicted upon black Americans of earlier and contemporaneous historical moments as well.

Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid posits “researchers who exploit[ed] African

Americans were the norm for much of our nation’s history,” and chronicles a litany of unethical

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experiments conducted upon black bodies as far back as the Antebellum period (Washington 12-

13). These historical incidents of black bodies apparent disposability in the face of technological and medical advancements across all fields of science is certainly a way of highlighting a sustained effort to dehumanize the racial other. Such a narrative of abject disposability of

Othered bodies beneath the gaze of Euro-American pseudoscientific faux-empiricism is likewise of a kind that led to the acceptance of expendability of Japanese bodies at Hiroshima and

Nagasaki (Dower 13).

What the birth of the Oshita twins does in the novel is force a moment of remembrance of the suppurating national wound in Japan that was the American Occupation in the aftermath of the atomic bombings. While the work the novel does in unflinchingly recounting the moment of atomic horror is compelling in its own right, and serves as a moment of evincing the advent of the narrative’s antagonistic forces (perhaps here staging a recontextualization of van Veen’s

Afrofuturist notion of historical trauma: “Armageddon been in effect”), it is the less bombastic horror of the Occupation itself that literally becomes the manifestation of the eponymous “Iron

Shadows” (266) The flash-frozen silhouettes of bodies destroyed by the atomic blast become synecdoche for the persistent malingering presence of the American armed forces that brought both military domination and the implicit and explicit hierarchical structures of racializing assemblages directly into the cultural matrix of Japanese postwar reconstruction.

Such themes of race in Japan are hardly new within the canon of postwar Japanese literature either, as Michael Molasky’s The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa:

Literature and Memory attests. In addition to exploring the concepts of “mixed blood” in postwar Japanese literature and occupation-era culture (65), Molasky’s monograph digs into the

Transpacific dimensions of race and anti-Black racism of a kind with what Barnes’s fiction

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explores. Oe Kenzaburo’s Akutagawa prize winning novella, Prize Stock , seeks to explore directly the vexed status of Blackness within the wartime milieu. Murakami Ryu’s novels, 69 and Almost Transparent Blue , and the preponderance of Yamada Eimi’s entire oeuvre 21 , play with the manifestations of Black sexualities in the liminal spaces of American military bases during and after the occupation era (73). Within the Japanese matrices of racial understanding that place Blackness, whiteness, and “Japanese-ness” in a state of constant tension during the occupation and decades that followed, it was a sense of framing Blackness in relation to the cultural contact zones of the base towns that persisted as a defining feature of Black masculinity.

As Molasky describes these controlling images of martial Black maleness, “the Black soldier is rarely permitted to represent anything but his race. His Blackness excludes him from the ‘high civilizations’ of the West and casts a shadow over any distinguishing personal qualities” (75).

But while the liminal spacetimes of the occupation-era contact and imagination surrounding Blackness acquired some stature within Japanese literature of the latter half of the twentieth century, American—and by extension, African American—literature also speaks to the experiences of the Black soldier in Asia. Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe (1992) and Toni

Morrison’s Home (2010) both explore the implications of Black soldiers’ imperialistic forays into nations of the Pacific rim at the behest of the American military apparatus. And campier works of genre fiction like Marc Olden’s Black Samurai (1974) and, in non-Black author, Neal

Stephenson’s cyberpunk-revival novel, Snow Crash (1992) explore the aftermath of such martial adventuring. Olden’s Black Samurai represents a Black American man who culturally adopts the practices of the Japanese community he becomes a part of. Stephenson’s novel utilizes the

21 Inclusive of novels like Bedtime Eyes (1985), Soul Music Lovers Only (1987), and Trash (1991), many of Yamada’s texts feature Japanese women as protagonists who are engaged in fairly toxic relationships with Black men.

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fantastic as a canvas upon which to imagine a biracial Black-Japanese hero who is born from a liaison to become a powerful force for global change. Iron Shadows , of course, does all of the above.

When Past is Made Future: Firedance and Multiracial Bodies of Memory

The framing of the AfroAsian somatic within Iron Shadows is perhaps a deeper engagement of a concept that Barnes actually introduced several years prior in his 1993 novel,

Firedance . The conclusion of his cyberpunk-adjacent trilogy of novels featuring the futuristic badman, Aubry Knight, Firedance represents what is potentially the apotheosis of Barnes’s

“hard SF” Afrofuturist fiction. The novel’s work with ideas of diaspora, masculinity, and a consummately multifaceted engagement with Blackness across a welter of spatio-temporal circumstances and contexts define its significance and stature within the remaining chapters of this dissertation. For now, though, it is simply suffice to say that the work, in a manner very much like Iron Shadows , is directly invested in exploring a confluence of Black and Asian identities within a the realm of AfroAsian Afrofuturism.

Firedance ’s futuristic world-building project is suffuse with many of the tropes of cyberpunk, a movement that had defining much of the SF of the mid- to late 1980s. But Barnes’s take on these conventions by the early 1990s was to infuse them with a sense of racial awareness of a sort that engaged cultural and historical particularities of the Afrodiaspora in a way that was much more pronounced than his contemporaries. In Firedance , for example, readers are introduced to the fictional superstate of PanAfrica, that “incorporates territory formerly divided into Zaire, Tanzania, and Uganda” (59) and was united by a regional strongman in the then- future of 1999 at which time, “after centuries of starvation, war, and disease, the world had wearied of Africa” (63).

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But the novel suggests that even though the Western world had “wearied” of Africa, Japan was waiting in the wings to stage its own form of international aid. There is space to read this intervention as not entirely benign—the PanAfrican dictator makes overtures not to the Japanese state, but rather, to “the largest criminal organization in Asia, the Divine Blossom Yakuza”

(64)—and the end result is here again rather far from the DuBoisean ideal of mutualistic uplift of the Darker People. Nevertheless, though, the cooperation of states that happen to be on the nonwhite side of the world color-line, is described as being more than enough to rouse the ire of the American government and precipitate a policy of “regime change” that drives much of the novel’s narrative action.

Within this future-history, however, there is a recursive framing of the AfroAsian body that

I think upsets the dourer aspects of neocolonialism and continental demagoguery. In the midst of the discussions of Japanese economic exploitation of PanAfrica’s resources, Barnes posits that a not insignificant part of the population of PanAfrica is of the rather dubiously named, “Afjap” ethnic subgroup (223). Through presenting this particular demographic, whose name seems to suggest the kind of hybridity that the progeny of exchange represent, the future embodiment of

AfroAsian identity. There is an element of suspicion surrounding the economic connections between Japan and PanAfrica in the novel, but in spite of it, these hybrid people's existence does not seem to hearken to the same kind of narratives of colonial violence that, for example, the so- called "Colored" people of South Africa embody. Black/Japanese people within PanAfrica are embraced as fully-participant members of the local society.

The most visible manifestation of this creation of an AfroAsian population within

PanAfrica is Tanaka Sinichi, the dictator’s chief of security and personal bodyguard (93).

Serving PanAfrica at the behest of the aforementioned Divine Blossom Yakuza, Tanaka is—like

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Joy and Tomo—a master martial artist and skilled swordsman. So skilled, in fact, that the climactic showdown in Firedance is actually not directly between Aubry-as-hero and the dictator, Swarna, but is instead between Aubry and Tanaka. In light of Barnes's penchant for wrapping things up with an epochal round of fisticuffs, this revelation-through-subversion speaks quite directly to just how important this Black/Japanese somatic embodiment really is. All the more so, in that Aubry verbally acknowledges Tanaka as an admirable and honorable adversary

(he unceremoniously kills Swarna) and asks him if he will consider staying on as a key member of the new PanAfrican regime.

Tanaka, like Tomo and Joy, presents an opportunity for Barnes to read the complicated history of racialization within AfroAsian contexts. In a brief bit of expository genealogy, readers learn much about Swarna's right hand man, and the various ways that race, racism, and racialization all influence the various branches of his family tree. The novel recounts that his grandmother was "a half-blooded Zulu who married a Japanese tradesman," and as a result

Sinichi's father, Tanaka Yoshi, was "a complete outcast," within Japanese society (94). But apparently there was a kind of DuBoisean implication of the connective power of hybridity here too, because after transcending the pariah status to marry the daughter of a Yakuza crime boss,

Yoshi "proved so valuable in opening Africa to the Yakuza that he gained a reasonable amount of real power, although [he remained] excluded from any of the family business" (94).

By using the expression "opening Africa" in this context, Barnes signifies on the nature of a potential (neo)colonialist dimension to the Japanese. Especially as we recall the language of

"opening" when used in reference to Japan's own 1853 visitation by the gunboat diplomacy of the American empire 22 . And all the more curious that there seems to be a presupposition that a

22 A historical point that Barnes actually references directly in Iron Shadows (263).

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kind of latent racial essentialism might be at work here in undergirding the utility of Yoshi's

"value" as a means of facilitating the connection across continents (which, in and of itself, likewise smacks of a less savory variation on the same sort of implications being broached in the more utopianist bent of Dark Princess ). That the Black/Japanese body here remains a site of

AfroAsian bridge-building remains undeniable; however, Firedance 's SF historical imagination presupposes that this can actually be coopted to serve more cynical ends.

Notwithstanding the fascinatingly unasked question of how he managed to ingratiate himself into a Yakuza clan, the signification of the tension surrounding Black bodies in Japanese cultural spaces again is highlighted as a potential sticking point. It calls to mind the 1986 outcry raised against then-prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, whose public sentiments regarding the strengths of ethno-nationalism within the Japanese state (contrasted to America, where

“intelligence levels” were declining because of the multicultural influences of “Blacks, Puerto

Ricans and Mexicans”) clearly reflected an institutional manifestation of anti-Black bias (Russell

1991, 3). The perception of Black alterity as near-abject in its presence in Japan and the US was also, unfortunately, re-inscribed within certain pop cultural phenomena, of which anime and manga were not immune. The visual rhetorics of Blackness in these media frequently—in the war years and immediate aftermath particularly—found themselves reflective of some of the less-savory artistic traditions of American influence: characters with tar-black skins and carmine,

Sambo-esque lips were not uncommon in the early days of the medium (Russell 1998, 124).

More recent years have seen the creation of more sophisticated (and less flagrantly problematic) depictions of Black characters in Japanese media. But it is worth noting that even these abject renditions of Blackness existed in parallel with AfroAsian traditions of cross-cultural connection and solidarity. That Black literature and thought were consumed and engaged with by

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Japanese scholars throughout the 60s and 70s, for example, or that, as John G. Russell explains,

“as Blacks around the world contested white hegemony, Japanese leftists were confronting similar issues at home: American imperialism, Vietnam, and the US-Japan Security Treaty,” are facts that serve as the roots of this particular angle of AfroAsian connectivity (120).

Conclusion

In contrast to Firedance ’s narrative, which produces a prototypic Black mecha allegory where Aubry’s fighting Black body becomes an AfroAsian Afrofuturist marker of ambiguity and conflict, Iron Shadows 's reading of the Black-and-Japanese body is more directly relevant to the re-articulation of Transpacific history remains an important part of these discussions. Cat and

Jax's struggle with the Oshita twins explores the historical significance of juxtaposing Black and

Japanese histories in the narrative of racial violence and assertions of domination in the latter half of the twentieth century. The novel thus still functions as a similar exercise in un-silencing the past through Barnes’s rendering of the Black-Japanese characters as embodied sites of racialized rememory within this Transpacific space. Although the bodies of these characters are explicitly rendered monstrous in their darkly fantastic setting, there is, through this utility of

AfroAsian speculative fiction, a possibility to explore precisely that kind of irresistibly discernible alterity as representing an important means of reworking and re-examining the histories that might otherwise go unexamined.

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CHAPTER 5

SOUL IN THE SHELL 23 :

THE AUBRY KNIGHT TRILOGY, BLACK MECHA, AND CYBERPUNK

INVESTIGATIONS OF TECHNOLOGICAL BLACK BODIES AS SITES OF

RECURSIVE HISTORICAL ENACTION

In the increasingly mechanized, automated, cybernated environment of the modern world—a cold, bodiless world of wheels, smooth plastic surfaces, tubes, pushbuttons, transistors, computers, jet propulsion, rockets to the moon, atomic energy—man’s need for affirmation of his biology has become that much more intense. He feels the need for a clear definition of where his body ends and the machine begins, where man ends and the extensions of man begin.

Eldridge Cleaver Soul on Ice

Introduction

In William Gibson’s 1981 short story, “The Gernsback Continuum,” he contributes to a blueprint for the cyberpunk literary movement’s self-aware critique of what he and other writers perceived as the staid and sanitized technophilic futurisms of the 1930s and 40s. A “devastating refutation of ‘scientifiction’ in its guise as narrow technolatry” in the words of fellow cyberpunk,

Bruce Sterling, Gibson’s story has its protagonist haunted by images of such a future-that-never- was (Gibson xii). These images that take visual and ideological cues from the titular continuum

23 The title of this chapter is itself derived from a mecha text: Shirow Masamune's 1989 manga (graphic novel), Ghost in the Shell. Shirow's narrative—which is frequently read as part of a larger cross-cultural dialectic between Western and Japanese takes on cyberpunk themes and aesthetics—concerns the existential concerns and action- packed policework experiences of a cyborg. The most pressing and ubiquitous of the issues presented within, is that of the matter of embodied consciousness, where the human mind (ghost) inhabits, animates, and influences the cyborg body (shell). I have opted to replace "ghost]" here, with "soul" as a rather more culturally relevant signifier on how Blackness operates within the context of what is to follow. And, indeed, “ghost,” itself is a rather loaded concept when broached in the context of cyberpunk: one of Gibson’s most relevant contributions to the discourse about the subgenre is that of the “semiotic ghost.” In addressing this concept of the future as having " come to America first," only to have "already passed it by," a spectral semiotic residual of the iconographies of futures-past continue to inform much of the then contemporary science fiction discourse (34). Insofar as those apparitions so often take the shape of anodyne, apolitical, and largely antisepctically white , "gee-whiz" technophilia of Gernsback's Amazing Stories magazine, Gibson's narrator finds himself bordering on madness as a result of his inability to square those images of "a 1980 that never happened" (28).

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of thought of Hugo Gernsback as one of the preeminent publishers of SF during the early part of the twentieth century. Idiosyncratic (if understated) of such early science fictions was the staging of their respective futurescapes within social paradigms that were, as Gibson highlights for us, uniformly and overwhelmingly white (34).

In his own fiction, informed as it was by the New Wave of SF that crested in the 1960s with writers like Harlan Ellison (and of course, Samuel Delany), Gibson and cyberpunks like him wanted to explore a futuristic imagination that could ask “messy” and intrinsically politicized questions (Sterling viii). Across the novels and considerable swaths of his short fiction, Gibson imagines multicultural urban sprawls where questions of identity and autonomy suffuse pessimisms of ubiquitous commodification, ecological blight, and a sense of seediness altogether out-of-alignment with Gernsback’s sensibility of salvation through technology.

Indeed, for Gibson, it is the very technology that facilitates privation, domination, and alienation.

Herein lies the rub, though: while movement cyberpunk writers like Gibson were exhorting the disaffected malcontent that visions of a techno-ambivalent SF futurescape represented, there remained the preoccupation with presenting “street-level” science fiction with the accoutrement of ethnic diversity 24 . Problematics, as one imagines, abound with this kind of approach, not least amongst them the specter of “techno-Orientalism,” which paints Gibson’s “Chiba City Blues” of a fetishistically inscrutable Japanese folks in a rather questionable light (Gibson 1; Tran 139).

And it warrants acknowledging that while his seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer , does indeed include visions of the future were diverse, imagining space-faring Caribbean

24 An oft-quoted line from Gibson’s titular short story in Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection, is that “the street finds its own uses for things,” which fully encapsulates the punk-ish sensibilities of technology democratized to the point of becoming passe. (199)

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Rastafarians 25 , hyper-advanced Japanese, and even sentient artificial intelligences which challenge the very arbitrary boundaries of what constitute humanity itself, cyberpunk fiction by and large (ironically) is comparably as white as the Gernsback text it exists in opposition to.

Writers within the movement are known and documented to be primarily white and male as well.

As such, the manifestations of issues of “diversity” might be (and are) aptly critiqued as window- dressing.

It is into this discussion of cyberpunk, however, that I wish to inject a reading of Steven

Barnes’s Aubry Knight novels—Streetlethal (1983) , Gorgon Child (1989) , and Firedance

(1993) . Published during this dynamic decade, Barnes’s work in these novels runs both chronologically and thematically parallel to the cyberpunk revolution’s upheaval within the landscape of SF. His particular approach, though, was paradoxically, generically conventional and refreshingly unique. The Aubry Knight trilogy took the hallmarks of a pulpy futuristic adventure in a gritty world of violence, drugs, and semiotic ghosts, and infused them with a racialized awareness that was not really apparent anywhere else in the cyberpunk canon.

Readings of Blackness in relation to cyberpunk are not unheard of, as Thomas Foster’s

2005 monograph, The Souls of Cyberfolk attempts to address the way that race might be explored through the conventions of the movement. But, as Sherryl Vint’s critique of his work points out, his readings of cybernetically enhanced Blackness are localized primarily through an analysis of the Marvel Comics limited-run series, Deathlok , and notably do not cover Barnes’s novels (Vint

310). While Foster’s text certainly offers meaningful methodological aid towards critically assessing the implications of what cyberpunk’s take on posthumanism can mean for Black

25 Which Black SF author Samuel Delany has some choice words about in a 1993 interview with Mark Dery: “you’ll forgive me if, as a Black reader, I didn’t leap up to proclaim this passing presentation of a powerless and wholly nonoppositional set of Black dropouts, by a Virginia-born white writer as the coming of a Black millennium in science fiction; but maybe that’s just a Black thing…” (195).

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folk—especially relative to the stated problematics of passing, assimilation, and blackface minstrelsy—it is my hope that my reading of Barnes’s trilogy will push the conceptual envelope by engaging with more and different concerns facing his idiosyncratic approaches to Black cyborgs (Foster 143).

The preceding chapters of this dissertation have presented a chronopolitics of reimagining the Afrodiasporic and AfroAsian past for the sake of articulating a reimagined site of Black agency and embodied subjectivity. The past as an “other-when” in Barnes’s speculative fiction derived meta-slave narrative is defamiliarized for the purposes of forcing readers to reconcile and remember the corrupting pathologies of human bondage. In Lion’s Blood and Blood

Brothers , the novels utilize narrative tropes and speculative signification for the purposes of staging systematic exercises in countermemory to un-silence Black voices in a subversion of the

Master(’s) Narratives within Euro-American-centered historiographies. Iron Shadows decontextualized historical Black ontology by separating it from what Michelle Wright identifies as the Middle Passage epistemology and allows for readers to “see and believe” the global dimensions of Blackness in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim.

I am likewise interested in their significance relative to the production of allegories through speculative narratives about the Black future. Barnes’s earliest works are situated in direct conversation with imaginative renderings of things-yet-to-come, and I argue that these novels have much to offer as paradigm-shifters in the vein of the SF mode of cyberpunk. Thus, I propose in this chapter to stage a protracted and investigative look at the novels in the Aubry

Knight trilogy. Aubry Knight, the protagonist of the three novels in question, presents something of a complicated anti-hero as a central site for conversations about the nature of the Black (male) cyborg somatic in SF world-building. This series, though, is clearly not invested in the wonder-

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inducing capacity of the so-called “Golden Age” of SF (1940s–50s) and its Anglo-American techno-optimism, and instead seems initially to highlight the multiculturalism, social anxiety, and somatic ambiguities of Western cyberpunk (Vint 24, 97). In this novel-cycle, Barnes ostensibly engages the aesthetics of the cyberpunk movement, only to ultimately subvert key aspects of its ideological underpinnings. In so doing, this trilogy provides an Afrofuturist alternative to the implicit Cartesian dichotomizing that so effectively defines the trope of cyberspace, and further proffers a more holistic engagement with Blackness, masculinity, and

Black bodies as sociohistorical assemblages.

In keeping with the discussions of the somatic and mecha-as-motif, I foreground a reading of cyborgs in my analysis of the novels. The cyborg is a cyber netic org anism, and a common metaphor of boundary-effacing fusion that manifests from cyberpunk fiction’s fascination with the ways that technology “invades” the body and mind (Sterling xi). While Gorgon Child and

Firedance feature variant takes on the digital Cartesianism that allows the human mind access to the realm of what Gibson describes as the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace’s digital simulacrum, I am more interested in the cyborg’s metaphorical application as a site of technological and somatic fusion and hybridity (Gibson 5). Describing a Black body already overdetermined by its sarkesthetics—the visibility, valuation, and social intelligibility of Black flesh—Barnes’s novels largely forego theorizing “the Net” as a means of escaping the body, and instead lean in on exploring just what exactly it means to live within a Black male body in an otherwise comparable dystopian futurescape.

And the Cartesian bifurcation of his male characters along the mind/body fault-line of what

Michele Wallace identifies as “Black macho” takes on an even greater significance when read in terms of his work in the conventions and aesthetics of cyberpunk. In point of fact, as the

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chapter’s epigraph suggests, we might convincingly argue that the kind of Black masculinity that

Barnes is proposing in the Aubry Knight trilogy has, as one strand of its ideological forebears, the Black Arts Movement treatises of Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka. Much like Cleaver’s claim that a (Black) man finds himself in the visceral sense of his corporeality at the edges of technology, the points raised in regards to the matters of cyberization and transhuman augmentation that his Aubry Knight books entertain do much to speak to the anxieties and ambivalence surrounding the creation of a Black cyborg body (Cleaver 234). Such a hybrid being is a ripe topic for speculation and theorizing, especially inasmuch as Barnes’s novels themselves seem to be so vexed in their own entertainment of it, since cyberization as somatic enhancement/restorative stands in rather stark contrast to the embodied male Blackness as somatic sublime his fiction otherwise seems to presuppose.

This chapter situates a reading of cybernetic Black male somatics through close readings of key aspects of Firedance , Gorgon Child , and Streetlethal . I first lay the schematics for the texts’ work with the technologized somatic as sign and signifier, reading the fictive sarkesthetic figurations of Black cyborg characters in conversation with the dynamics of controlling images of Black masculinity. This segues into a more specific reading of Aubry as the central character in Barnes’s saga as Afrofuturist Bad Man, a cyberpunk Stagolee, who channels key elements of the traveling moral hard-case, with latent aggression and blues ethos. I then put Aubry into what might be identified as a “Gibson Continuum” in analyzing Streetlethal and Gorgon Child in direct conversation with cyberpunk fiction’s larger conventions of Cartesianism. But in exploring

Gorgon Child ’s wrestling with gendered and raced identity politics I find a transitional moment within Barnes’s canon; one that finds fruition in Firedance. I read the concluding novel of the trilogy as actively reworking cyberpunk to take on the ideological stance of Afrofuturism .

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The Aubry Knight Trilogy and the “Omnipotent Hypermasculine” Contrasting Black Ontology and Cyberpunk Themes of Cartesianism

Arguably, though, this global dimension for the creation of space for Blackness within the futuristic cyberpunk landscape of Aubry’s world does still have the germ of its existence planted within Streetlethal. The novel’s world is suffused with neon and rain, both hallmarks of cyberpunk visual aesthetics, and is well away from the techno-optimism of earlier SF movements, marked as it is by drugs, disease, and economic blight. Indeed, though Barnes himself is not generally read as a part of the cyberpunk movement and is not anthologized in collections or referenced in scholarship thereupon, the novel actively suggests common genealogy with this grittier take on futurism.

This gritty world of Aubry’s future (circa 2030) is also an inherently violent one. Cartels jockey with corrupted politicians; tensions smolder on the disparate sides of a yawning social and physical chasm26 between the wealthy and the economically dispossessed; various factions of autonomous gender sects exist in separate parts of the country; and the United States as a whole wrestles with the existential threats of a technocratic Japan and an economically and militarily ascendant African superstate, “PanAfrica” (comprised of the territory of present day

Kenya, Uganda, and other actual African nations). Conflict defines this futurescape. However, while struggle and violence certainly function at the macro-level of whole imagined communities grinding against one another, the nature of conflict is also felt through Barnes’s work in conveying the embodied subjectivity of Aubry as his central character. Though simply an individual in the face of social forces considerably more prodigious in their dimensions than he,

26 The novels do suppose a physical separation of the peoples who inhabit this future Los Angeles, with the less- fortunate inhabitants of the city still dwelling within the burned-out wreckage of a massive earthquake. This swath of urban wreckage is colloquially referred to by the characters as “The Maze”.

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Aubry’s fists and feet time and again serve to shake the foundations of the adversarial men and institutions arrayed against him.

Aubry Knight, a Black man in this gritty and unforgiving future, lives by meeting violence with violence. In Streetlethal, Barnes first introduces the character as former “ nullboxer,” a pugilist who competes in high-stakes, zero-gravity fight matches that are stationed in near-earth orbit (2). By the onset of narrative action, however, his sanctioned fighting days are behind him, and he has become a hired-goon for a massive California drug cartel. His loyalty is ultimately unrewarded, though, as he is betrayed and incarcerated by the duplicitous machinations of syndicate boss Luis Ortega and the rest of his family, who plan to flood the LA streets with a new sort of hyperaddictive drug, the mushroom-derived Cyloxibin. After escaping from Death

Valley Supermax prison, Aubry meets and falls in love with Promise Cotounou, an “Exotic” cyborg who has half of her body grafted with luminescent “plastiskin” (Barnes 56). The two of them ultimately topple the cartel and stymie its drug operations. Their further adventures in

Gorgon Child see them take on a more nationally significant position, as Aubry is tasked with saving the American president from assassination by a rogue faction of genetically and cybernetically modified supersoldiers.

Streetlethal and Gorgon Child establish Aubry as a warrior-orphan and product of “the streets.” Firedance, however, provides a bit of retroactive-continuity editing by revealing the missing backstory to Aubry’s childhood. In a bleak exercise in SF troping, the novel ultimately discloses that Aubry, is in reality a clone of its central antagonist, Phillipe Swarna, dictatorial ruler of PanAfrica. Conversing with one of the other clones, San, Aubry is confronted with the reality of his adversary’s understanding of his Black flesh as consummately objectifiable and disposable:

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“We are what Phillipe Swarna created to keep himself alive. At first he did it to continue his work. Then he did it because he was mortally afraid of death.” “Death,” Aubry said. “‘Everything of Life is born of woman,’” San quoted. “In creating us, he created something not of life. We were his extra hearts, and brains, and livers. When a piece malfunctioned, he took from us. There were three generations of clones—you were first generation. You are the only survivor of the original Six, forty years ago. Fifteen years later he grew six more. And when he had used those up, he created us, the last. The nanotech is more efficient than transplantation. We are the last generation. Only one of us, Ichi 27 , was sacrificed in the white room. The other five became his most private enforcement arm. His personal bodyguard.” (343)

While the San and the others remained to guard Swarna’s body (rather than become part of it),

Aubry grew up in America, spirited out of his homeland before he could be reduced to “spare parts” for his genetic father. Stateside, he was reared under the tutelage of PanAfrican defector

Thomas Jai, who becomes the young Aubry’s erstwhile “father.” Upon their arrival in Los

Angeles, Thomas is killed by rogue toughs in an alleyway, right in front of Aubry. After witnessing the man he thought to be his father die, the boy begins his journey towards manhood

(and the life of military service, nullboxing, and crime attendant therewith).

The trilogy concludes with Aubry on a mission from the US government to depose Swarna.

Rather than blindly serving the ends of neocolonial (and barely-disguised racist) American interventionist foreign policy, however, Aubry instead reconnects with the indigenous (fictional)

Ibandi people of PanAfrica. To fully become a part of this community, which produced both his genetic and foster fathers, he undergoes the rites of manhood initiation, embracing this African identity and balking his American-derived mission. He still kills the despotic Swarna, but does so

27 It should be noted that San and Ichi (and the rest of the final six clones), have Japanese numerals as designation, rather than actual names. (Ichi is “one,” Ni is “two,” San for “three,” and so forth.)

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on his own terms, and then claims the throne for himself. His journey from the LA gutters to the head of global technocracy thus reaches its end.

In looking at the Aubry Knight books in aggregate, in reading the narrative as a whole, several factors become immediately apparent. First, the narrative spirals progressively outward, providing readers with an ever-widening perspective on the world itself, and the geopolitical

(and historical) realities that define it. In Streetlethal , nearly the whole of narrative action is centered within California, and specifically the city of Los Angeles. Gorgon Child opens things to encompass more of the West Coast as a region, with adventures in Oregon and Arizona that take the action farther afield. But it is Firedance with its adventures in PanAfrica and elsewhere, that truly makes the series global in its dimensions.

Concomitant with this spatial spiralling outward, the theme of cycles is likewise embedded within the temporality of the saga. In each novel, Aubry repeats an almost textbook narrative arc of Campbell’s hero’s journey, traveling again and again from the proverbial belly of the beast, to dizzying heights of climactic conflict with varying permutations of figurative dragons to slay.

This suggestion of progression that is not entirely linear, suggests a chronopolitical dimension to

Barnes’s work in the trilogy. By framing the journey as one that is leading to PanAfrica itself,

Gorgon Child and Firedance proleptically insinuate a Black Atlantic historical past into its visions of the future. This kind of countermemory project is made more legible through Kinitra

Brooks’s utility of the concept of “Sankofarration 28 ” (a portmanteau that combines “sankofa”—a

Ghanian expression meaning “to go back and fetch it”—and “narration”) (240). Sankofarration,

Brooks suggests, has especial utility in grasping the return of the past, and is applicable in Black

28 Initially coined by John Jennings, Brooks utilizes the term specifically within the context of black horror fiction. She cites specifically the tropes of haunting and the living dead as means of having the past literally manifest itself within the context of the present.

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mecha narratives like Firedance which privilege storytelling that makes the act of spatio- temporal return so central. Brooks’s assertion that sankofarration “claim[s] the future as well as the past” (240) suggests how black mecha narratives go-back-and-fetch a sense of lost wholeness through prosthetic re-engagements with future technologies. Cycles within cycles, the largest and most significant of these instances of sankofarration is laid plain in Firedance, which literally takes his life-/hero’s journey, and renders it within the context of an actual return to Africa.

Coincidental with the novels’ increasingly globalized perspectives, Barnes’s fiction begins to express more of a self-evident awareness of the racial ramifications of the characterizations within. Which is perhaps why they work so well thematically in conversation with cyberpunk. A

SF movement that, as Sterling defines it, views global awareness as, “more than an article of faith,” but “a deliberate pursuit” that exists as part of a larger eighties sociocultural zeitgeist: an

“era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridized influences, of old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with new sophistication, a broader perspective” (xii). There is “diversity” in the novels, which while perhaps in keeping with a Gibsonian pushback against the archaism of racially homogeneous SF and is also reflexive of the sociocultural realities (and extrapolations) of life in Los Angeles itself. But Barnes’s somatic descriptions in Streetlethal and Gorgon Child are, quite literally, skin deep. Firedance, ultimately does pose questions surrounding “the fact of

Blackness” that, as Fanon describes, are deeper than mere epidermal schema, and do evoke that existential trebling whereby body, race, and lineage are all made to be felt as “fact of Blackness”

(112).

Such a progression signifies on the rather curious positioning of Aubry’s Blackness as a social marker of identity. Indeed, I would hazard that the ways that Aubry is Black can and do change over time, resulting in a possible interpretation of this facet of his identity as

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epiphenomenon, as theorized in Michelle M. Wright’s Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle

Passage Epistemology. Wright frames Blackness as less a matter of what and more a function of when, particularly insofar as it relates to the way Diasporic Blackness does and does not find itself overdetermined by the epistemological authenticity conferred through historical relationships with the Middle Passage. Such epiphenomenological positioning of readings of

Blackness allows Wright to frame the connections being made through Blackness as discernible in vertical and horizontal framing (10-11). We see that in Aubry’s case in the cyberpunk-esque texts that are Streetlethal and Gorgon Child , his Blackness is an ahistorical incidental, read only as a marker of verticality within the hierarchy of the dystopian society. By contrast, when he becomes implicated in Firedance ’s literal journey “Back to Africa,” however, the significance of his Blackness, predictably reads more prominently as a marker of lateral connectivity across space and time.

This sustained engagement with Afrodiasporic elements within this assessment of future technologies is one I propose to read as stemming from another aspect of Black mecha's conceptual genealogy: Afrofuturism. While more contemporary scholars and theorists 29 of

Afrofuturism have pushed the boundaries of the definition beyond Mark Dery’s initial coinage of the term (in particular its situation squarely relative to African American concerns, and addressing the more diasporic dimensions), my work with Barnes’s trilogy here focuses quite directly upon Dery’s phrase, “a prosthetically enhanced future” (180). I have chosen to highlight this line’s implications of prosthetic enhancement in reference to hybridity/syncretism as a gesture towards the potential importance of the cyborg’s possession of physical qualities of a

29 Including Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones’s articulation of the concept as Afrofuturism 2.0, which expands the definition to address a “technogenesis of black identity” that is invested in an Afrodiasporic and transnational notion of blackness along political, cultural, aesthetic, and techno-scientific axes (ix-x).

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fused somatic, wherein technology melds with the organic body. Thus, following in the footsteps of Dery, Braithwaite, Harley and others, who have done readings of cybernetic augmentation in

Black comics and fiction, I see Afrofuturism as a way to begin to be unpack the issues surrounding the presence of Black cyborgs in Barnes’s fiction beyond the fleshly realms of scars.

In referring once again to Henderson’s text, Scarring the Black Body , Black mecha as allegorical motif reads diaspora as a definitive manifestation of a scar, being both wounding act and an attempt towards healing. But rather than finding a biologically rendered means of denoting healing, Firedance and the rest of the Aubry Knight cycle may be read as presenting cybernetic prostheses as a means of symbolically facilitating a healing reconnection in the wake of the primal act of severance. Black mecha motifs of allegorically depicting healing-through- reconnection likewise suture Henderson’s notion of the scar with Afrofuturist and Afrodiasporic dimensions of black mecha motifs stems from engagement with Alisa K. Braithwaite’s concept of “prosthetic community” (87).

Braithwaite’s reading of Brent Edwards’s work on the term “ decalage” —which he defines as to “restore a prior state of unevenness or diversity” (87–88)—allows for Black mecha texts to utilize narrative constructions of the cyborg as a means to reconnect the disparate elements of black life sundered by the slave trade. In writing about SF instances of artificial reconnection across segments of the Afrodiasporic world, Braithwaite focuses on “metaphorical prostheses” that facilitate the decalage process, here seen as a chronopolitics of going-back-and-fetching lost sociohistorical connections across the African Diaspora (88). I read Braithwaite as highlighting the sites of fusion and reconnection as an analytical tool to assess the allegorical trope of prosthetic enhancements that speak to elements of black mecha. These artificially reconnected communities are linked across spacetime yet marked by violent separation and historical trauma

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(Braithwaite 88, Edwards 66). Firedance, more so than Streetlethal or Gorgon Child , presents a cyborg allegory for the prosthetic fusion with the black body and mind and serves as a symbol of diasporic reconnection and healing.

I suggest that this theoretical framing of reconnection through Black body as prosthetic assemblage of somatic history has much to do with the chronopolitics of apocalyptic severance and alienation articulated in van Veen’s “Armageddon Effect.” By highlighting the world-ending nature of the historical act of forcibly taking Black people away from the African continent with the presumptive impossibility of return, the separation cleaves the Afrodiasporic community into multiple disparate and distinct groups (Braithwaite 88, van Veen 68). Time, then, becomes a space for crafting distinct narratives, histories, and spaces to theorize prosthetic (read: artificial) means by which to reconnect with the communities that do exist within the Afrodiaspora itself

(Braithwaite 88, Edwards 66). The act of connection, read with the understanding that there is no space for naïve nostalgia for a home that no longer exists, can instead be understood in

Firedance as cyborg allegory with the prosthetic augmentation of Black body and mind serving as an iconography of that diasporic reconnection and healing through a politics of subverting

Eurocentric notions of historical spacetime.

It is the chronopolitical issue of depicting a body-in-history (through defamiliarizing the body of history) that remains perhaps the standout facet of the trilogy’s narrative, and proves to be one of the most significant aspects of any and all critical engagement with the question of why exactly the novels themselves matter , beyond their simple existence and attendant ability to plug the Black male shaped lacunae in the pantheon of cyberpunk protagonists. Especially insofar as the novels self-evident reluctance in exploring Black masculinity as represented through the cyborg fusions that define so much of the rest of the dramatis personae . When

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nearly everyone surrounding Aubry (the most prominent Black man in the novels) is the product of some manner of flesh/tech hybridization, and when it is not until he is coerced by the US government into playing the agent provocateur in PanAfrica, it suggests a kind of significance to the narrative’s framing of somatics in general and Black somatics in particular, that warrants further critical explication.

In keeping with the ideas of Afrofuturistic fusion and reconnection, the narratives of the novels make much of the fact that Aubry must undertake the seemingly Sisyphean task of keeping mind, spirit, and body as close to unified as possible. The sense of wholeness is integral to his establishing for himself just who exactly he is. And more immediately, for him to achieve his aims of rescuing his lover, protecting his child, and reconnecting with his people, no one facet of his selfhood may be neglected. He is supremely physically powerful, to be sure. But the more esoteric/numinal facets of self must repeatedly be brought into alignment.

This, it should be stated, is a rather different track from most other manifestations of cyberpunk fiction. Although the novels’ social aesthetics of an “integration of technology and the

Eighties counterculture” would seem to put the Aubry Knight trilogy at least in the orbit of what

Bruce Sterling defines as cyberpunk, the bodies of the people inhabiting the majority of those worlds are seen as, at best, customizable through prosthetic enhancements, and, at worst, a malingering pile of flesh simply supporting a consciousness not quite able to fully embrace cyberspace ( Mirrorshades x). Case, the protagonist of Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel,

Neuromancer, makes this plain: “the elite stance [of a cyberspace cowboy] involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh”

(6).

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Unlike, Case and the other characters in Neuromancer 30 , Aubry is not trying to find new and more effective ways of escaping the body. Instead, he is looking for better ways to more holistically operate within it (and to stay alive long enough to do so). This contrast is structured through Barnes’s thematic repudiation of cyberpunk’s revived Enlightenment notions of dichotomized mind-body dualism. In a personal interview, Barnes told me that the character was conceived as a way of doing precisely that: a way to “look beyond the dualisms” and “resolve dualities” (February 3, 2018). He further remarked that (whether discussing fictive characters, or the lived experiences of people in the real world) to do so, to step beyond the arbitrary dichotomies between mind and body, is to run the risk of overcorrecting and either making the self too vulnerable or too brutal. The goal of life—and what he envisioned Aubry as pursuing in his journey—was to be “safe enough to be gentle” and to find a “strength to protect softness.”

In the novels, then, the physical strength that Aubry has taken to the levels of somatic sublime is merely a starting point. He states in Firedance : “I only survived because of this body…because it is faster and stronger and has more energy than any body has the right to have”

(73). But survival is a bare minimum. Barnes would have us understand that the truest strength

(whether literal or figurative) comes from achieving a sort of mind-body balance. This means that the works in the trilogy must also resist the temptation to diminish the importance of the body itself by situating the action solely within the realm of cognitive matrices like

Neuromancer ’s cyberspace 31 , where bodies are simply incidental and their parts are cybernetically interchangeable . The male characters in movement cyberpunk fiction are

30 This motif is repeated elsewhere in the use of the cyberspace trope in the rest of Gibson’s “Sprawl” series—the novels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive , and the short stories, “Johnny Mnemonic,” and “Burning Chrome”— and also in attendant cyberpunk revival novels like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash , and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One . 31 Though rather less so in postcyberpunk iterations of the “metaverse” in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) or the “OASIS” in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011).

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generally possessed of bodies that reflect the disdain that they have for “reality,” and thus face a different set of challenges (which, Cleaver was perhaps prescient in Soul on Ice’ s rendering of white masculinity as archetypically “omnipotent administrator”). On the other hand, as mighty a fortress as Aubry’s flesh is, though, the novel suggests that without addressing the other facets of his existence beyond simply the somatic, he will not be able to survive the trials he faces. He must, in the framework provided by Spillers, become more than “flesh” and recognize that he is a fully animate body . Speculating about him in the context of cybernetic augmentation, one character in Firedance identifies him as “a spiritual cripple and an emotional child with a perfectly developed body” (145).

The language and context of the conversation here are worth analyzing relative to the larger issue of allegorical potential within Firedance as a novel utilizing Black mecha motifs. It evokes Henderson’s notion of the scar, and frames the discourse in a manner that is immediately recognizable as utilizing a language of bodily wounding. But the such wounding here, inflicted as it is by time and a future America still wrestling with the specters of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, need a healing only possible through the psycho-spiritual progression that is a key part of his character arc. The progression, though, is one that must ironically be undertaken through a narrative of return, and one of prosthetic reconnection with Diasporic homeland. While these prostheses here take the form of cybernetic enhancement, the series is adamant in its expression that such healing is not possible through exploits in the dichotomized mind-body matrices of cyberspace, but through bringing the body back across the Atlantic basin and confronting and besting the primal trauma that inflicted the severing wound in the first place.

It is here, in achieving a more holistic sense of self-actualization that Aubry begins to embrace a cyborg identity, and thus brings about the mecha potential of Firedance . Whereas the

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narrative has him augmented—“’We’re destroying his face, and rewiring his mind. What do you expect to remain?’…‘His soul, of course’” (Barnes 1993: 138)—the enhancements are not at the expense of either facet of his identity. Instead of fracturing, as Gibson’s Case does, along constitutive lines of Cartesian duality into mind and body, Aubry’s cyborg identity could be said to be a more complete manifestation of the concept, effacing the boundaries within him.

What my work with Black mecha conventions looks to add to that conversation is a practical analytical survey of a particular author’s work with Black masculinity as a creative way of challenging the implicit biases of cyberpunk and its antecedent moves in the Cartesian traditions of liberal humanism. The use of cyborg figures that fuse black and technological bodies makes for a meaningful, holistic signifier of the “mind” as part of the body, but also of futuristic technology as a means to recover and reconnect, by way of cyborg fusion, a Black

“mind” denied by the biological pseudo-sciences of white supremacy. The black mecha body is a body marked by its chronopolitical engagement with the historical rupture of the Middle

Passage. It makes whole again, by way of technological prosthesis, a body split by the

Cartesianism of the colonizer, and it utilizes its technological hybridity to prosthetically reconnect Afrodiasporic communities that have been disconnected by slavery (Edwards 66).

In speaking to the kinds of technologized bodies (and minds) that populate cyberpunk fictions, it should come as no surprise that my work here is indebted to a reading of Haraway’s classic treatise on the nature of boundary obfuscation and the development of a particular kind of hybridity evinced by the advent of the cyborg as an inextricable combination of flesh and machinery. But while her work seeks to find foundational use of the cyborg as metaphor for an ahistorical being that eschews the necessity for beginnings and endings of either temporal or somatic sorts, my own reading pushes back against such a naïve blindness to the scars of

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Blackness through time. Any attempt to articulate a discourse surrounding Black bodies and the cybernetic augmentation thereof, I argue, using the parlance of Spillers, must speak to the ever- present trauma of American society’s historical rendering of Black peoples’ bodies as mere objective “flesh.” A flesh of a sort that was always-already overdetermined as a kind of low-tech, agrarian labor-saving “device,” which Alexis Harley provides a framework for addressing through an investigation of the post-Enlightenment American milieu her essay, “Slavery of the

Machine.”

Harley’s remarks also address the problematics of the Cartesian tradition (which she specifies as derived from “rationalist humanism”) in the coding of two types of bodies: the unmarked, capital-“M” Man which implicitly designates white masculinity, and the human marked 32 by bodily difference to this white masculine ideal (221). Insofar as that difference is gendered, (dis)abled, and raced, a marked body is all body, and has been constructed and historicized through the biological determinism and legislation of institutional patriarchal white supremacy that denies subjectivity. Read in this way, the situating of Black cyborgs represents a rather more fraught iconography than might stand as customary in cyberpunk and the science fictions of the 1980s and onward, including Barnes’s own oeuvre.

Another way of situating the cyborg as means of expressing American social anxieties over race is found in Leilani Nishime’s “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future,” which focuses upon the cyborg as a signifier of racial hybridity. Nishime’s scholarship on the racial dimensions of the cyborg, we acknowledge that the technologized body often functions as a

32 A phrasing which is quite evocative of Hortense Spillers’s opening line of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” and as such, perhaps calls to mind the attendant conversations about gendered and historicized Black bodies (vs. Black flesh).

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signifier white humanity and mechanized alterity 33 . Thus, a fusion of (white) organic bodies with

Otherized mechanical components signifies latent historical fears of “miscegenation” and

“passing,” signifying concerns over the cyborg’s transgressive and boundary-obfuscating capacities (Nishime 34). Nishime remarks upon of cyborgs as evoking concepts of racial hybridity and the residual spectral fears of “miscegenation” and “passing” as evidence of what is essentially sublimated concerns of the figures transgressive and boundary-obfuscating capacity

(35); however, the cyborgs that she references—including Ash from Alien (1979), the eponymous Terminator of that film franchise (1984), and A.I. ’s (2001) David—are themselves all white-presenting in their human elements (38-39). Further extant scholarship on Black cyborg figures is found in Joy James’s revisitation of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth wherein she proffers that the aggregate of colonized bodies become “mechanized” in rebellion against oppressive systems of domination (61). The totalizing struggle for freedom James sees in Fanon suggests that those in resistance must come together and recognize the innate fusion of

“biological, mechanical, [and] divine” that animates their cyborg resistance (61). Both James’s and Nishime’s approaches seek to recognize how Afrodiasporic allegories of cyborg fusion express both the fears of the colonizer and provide a motif for anticolonial resistance. Black mecha as a motif takes such tropes as foundational in its representational strategies and specifies a narrative praxis of framing Afrodiasporic narratives of communities and reconnection.

Building a Blacker Cyborg:

33 A similar approach might be seen in Isaiah Lavender’s concept of “technicity,” which sees texts dealing with tropes of autonomous artificial intelligences—cyborgs, androids, or robots—as functioning in the capacity of defamiliarized racial alterity. The portmanteau signifies a link between “technical” and “ethnicity” (189).

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Framing Fusion, Connectivity, and Prosthesis in Aubry Knight’s Black Male Somatic

I find the iconography of the Black cyborg to be quite helpful in assessing just what exactly is at stake in Barnes’s rendering of Aubry’s world. And the staging of this allegory of prosthetic reconnection across the wounds of diaspora is perhaps all the more significant because throughout the first two thirds of the trilogy, Aubry himself remains a figure that would not be described as an actual cyborg in the cyberpunk-adjacent conceptualization of the trope. Thus, we recognize and acknowledge that the allegorical dimensions of fusion and reconnection through the symbolic trope of the cyborg body do not become explicitly apparent until very near the end of his adventures, when Aubry at last is fitted with cybernetic prostheses. And even then, discussing his character as a manifestation of Black mecha’s mechanically augmented blackness becomes somewhat vexed, as his cybernetic enhancements—neural prostheses that allow for perfect translation and comprehension of multiple languages—are not immediately perceivable markers of somatic difference by the characters he encounters. There is nothing in Aubry’s somatic figuration in Firedance that suggests, for example, the frank visual immediacy of the cybernetic enhancements and prostheses in Neuromancer 34 . For all the Aubry Knight trilogy’s temporal and thematic proximity to cyberpunk novels, this reluctance towards actually depicting a cybernetic Black body, might possibly be read as suggesting a latent conflict surrounding the aesthetic and narrative significance of an “au naturale” Black male somatic that informs so much of Barnes’s work.

34 Although the novel explores the implications of organ and neuron replacement and enhancement, very early on Gibson introduces readers to a grizzled bartender whose “antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic” (4). The implied spectacle of such obvious cybernetic augmentation is frank indeed, especially, as the description continues, “in an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about the lack of it” (4).

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Believing himself to be a man of America (if not explicitly an “American”) his body throughout Streetlethal and Gorgon Child signifies a kind of essentialized integrity of the remaining hermetically “sealed.” But in a cyberpunk-derived world of ubiquitous liminality and cyborg hybridity—Sterling speaks of cyberpunk’s defining themes of technology as “body invasion” with “prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration” and

“mind invasion” with “brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry”—such an articulation of fully organic Black-flesh-as-identity makes him isolated as well as unique (xi).

Hybridized Black male bodies in particular, is rare to the point of noteworthiness among all the other manifestations of cyberized bodies that exist in the demographic variance of the

Aubry Knight trilogy’s futurescape. I read this conspicuous absence as indicating a species of anxiety surrounding this kind of Black male bodily modification that, whilst not in and of itself flagrantly technophobic, certainly has tropological antecedents in the rhetoric and theming surrounding the John Henry folkloric tradition. But the technical enhancement for the polyglot capacities necessary for Firedance’s narrative of Aubry’s personal return to the African continent are of a largely invisible sort. The implications of his Black mecha status and the novel’s thematic work with his cyborg identity facilitate the bridging of the diasporic rupture brought about by the history implicit in the very fact of his Blackness.

This textual ambivalence, surrounding Black male cyberization, is productive towards reading the novels as indicative of the symbolic signification that the motifs of fusion and reconnection bound within Black mecha. In addition to the function of cyberization seen in

Black mecha texts like Firedance serving as allegorical concept, I am likewise interested in testing its operation at a quite literal level within the text. I wish to unpack the larger concerns relevant to the textual and narrative depictions of Black cyborg characters like Aubry. I want to

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consider his role within the stories he occupies, and address his existence as a visual representation within the future space the novels proffer of a socio-historical refiguring of a kind of overtly transgressive Black masculinity.

A point of considerable contrast, we might note, when juxtaposed with his child, Leslie, who is first introduced in Gorgon Child . Where Aubry presents a Black body that is (at least initially) entirely bound within notions of “authenticity” and essentialism, Leslie is a child of perpetual boundary-transgression. Not merely the most elite of the cybernetically enhanced and hormonally accelerated Gorgon special ops unity (the very same that attempted to kill Aubry during an aborted coup within the American government), Leslie is both multiracial and, as described in the novels, a “hermaphrodite”. Capable of undertaking the quintessentially cyberpunk motif of “jacking in 35 ” and projecting their 36 consciousness into cyberspace, Leslie nonetheless still retains a discernible separation from more overtly Cartesian characters in that they also—like their father—represent an emphasis on finding truer strength through a holistic sense of self through reconciling body and mind.

Leslie’s obliteration of identity boundaries is all the starker when read against the kind of problematically persistent stereotypes of Black embodied masculinity that frame their father as a latently violent, frequently destructive, and occasionally infantilized “Buck” in Streetlethal and

Gorgon Child . By Firedance , though, when the narrative has taken on much more radically globalized worldview, and begun to meaningfully engage with an Afrofuturist chronopolitics of

Transatlantic Blackness, Barnes’s rendering of his hero is able to move away from such

35 The actual process of accessing the “virtual world of Firedance ’s cyberspace continuum is very much akin to separation of body and mind that Gibson’s Case, and Ghost in the Shell’ s protagonist, Kusanagi Motoko, are able to effect. One of Leslie’s first-person description of the process is as follows: “I raced through the wiring wide as railway tunnels, my consciousness a ghost in the machine” (356). 36 The novels use an archaic and vaguely problematical pronoun system of alternating between “he” and “she” when referencing Leslie (having Promise refer to the child as a daughter and Aubry refer to them as a son). In the interest of respect towards the intersex community, I have opted to use the singular “they” when referencing Leslie.

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problematically essentialized notions of identity. As such, whereas the preceding texts render

Aubry a proverbial island unto himself, never feeling quite “at home,” or “belonging,” Firedance creates space for a kind of postmodern Blackness of hybridity and reconnection.

And yet, for all the significance that might be productively unpacked in the reading of

Blackness within the Aubry Knight trilogy, Barnes himself explained in the course of the personal interview I conducted with him, that the issues at stake in the novel are more about ethnicity and nationality than race per se (Personal Interview, February 3, 2018). This fascinating interpretation certainly has its own kind of conceptual weight vis-à-vis the historiography of the

Black Atlantic and the theoretical distance between Firedance ’s PanAfrica and, for example, the

Pan-Africa of twentieth century Black American cultural nationalists. Nonetheless, I maintain that there remains salient and important elements of racialized Blackness (within Diaspora) as a socially and historically constructed phenomenon central to the trilogy’s overarching narrative.

Barnes explains that Aubry’s concerns qua race are not a part of the foundations of his struggle in America; yet, when we take a step back and attempt to frame Aubry’s saga in conversation with larger Black political and aesthetic movements, even the earlier phases of his journey offer meaningful insights into the genealogies that he exists in relationship to. At the very least, the iconographies of his racially unambiguous masculinity within certain segments of Black

American fiction stand, perhaps, as an interesting anticipatory stage and conceptual parallelism to Barnes fictive approach. The writings of Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Walter Mosley and others, while not directly influencing Barnes’s brand of fiction, do seem to provide Aubry with a cadre of literary brethren.

As we have seen in the examinations of Blood Brothers and Lion’s Blood , a specific mode of theorizing racial identity certainly becomes a focal point for Barnes’s oeuvre. And he

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explained that in moments after his career as a writer had taken off, that to avoid the issue of

Blackness in his fiction would be ultimately disingenuous to his own sense of self and identity

(Personal Interview, February 3 2018). And thus, as he explained in interviews to me and other scholars, there exists an inherent importance in recognizing Aubry (at least as much as Kai and

Derek) as an important manifestation of an Afrofuturist hero: Barnes’s writings with Aubry ultimately serve to reflect his desire to create racially distinctive Black heroic figures who could stand toe-to-toe with the fantastical, lantern-jawed SF and fantasy icons of his own youthful days, like Conan the Barbarian 37 (Govan 28). And for all of his self-professed reluctance to write

“the great Black American novel,” and the more immediate attribution of influence that Barnes makes for other strands of literary and speculative fictions upon his prose and characterization, his Aubry Knight books stand to gain considerable academic merit when placed in conversation with hallmarks of Black literary and folk-cultural traditions surrounding the Black masculinity

(28). We might, for instance, read Aubry as a latter-day Bigger Thomas, in keeping with

Wright’s essay on “How Bigger was Born,” regarding his demonstrable capacity for violence and resistance to either respectability or hegemonic notions of racial propriety. Or, as I proffer below, he might meaningfully be placed in conversation with figures who are part of Black vernacular storytelling traditions: John Henry, Stagolee, and Jack Johnson.

Among those three, there is throughout both Streetlethal and Gorgon Child an evident through-line of comparison to be made in juxtaposing Aubry and John Henry in particular, who renders a topos of a clash between a naturalistic(/primitivist?) rendering of a primal,

“authentic(?),” and unenhanced Black male somatic sublime and the instrumentalized trope of white, logocentric industrialization in the form of the steam-powered drill he must compete

37 Andre M. Carrington’s Speculative Blackness does a highly effective job of unpacking the nature of Robert E. Howard’s character, Conan the Barbarian, and his evident influences upon Barnes’s fiction. (181)

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against. As Joel Dinerstein reads the significance of Henry as archetypal hero by bringing up the very heart of what he signifies: “John Henry took on the Euro-American male’s most lethal weapon: his technology, and work based on that technology” (121). Dinerstein further elaborates that, in the ballads of Henry, “In performance, the singer almost always lingers over the line, ‘a man ain’t nothing but a man,’ which resonates in terms both of the man vs. machine frame story and the Black man vs. White man subtext” (121).

Barnes’s readings of masculinity become further legible when read through the discursive articulations of organic Black male somatics propounded in the 1960s essays of Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver. The theories are, admittedly, dated in their essentializing articulations of a kind of one-size-fits-all manifestation of “correct” Black maleness. Both men see the increasing distance of whiteness from the Body as being facilitated by a reliance upon technology, or the

“nonrealistic” or “nonphysical” as Baraka calls it (243-44). Cleaver (in further extrapolating the schematic of his Black Supermasculine Menial/white Omnipotent Administrator dialectic), ironically, sees the bifurcation in terms of the selfsame Cartesianism that defines so much of 80s cyberpunk, and most directly contextualizes Aubry’s distinctive position relative to it. It is in this connection [of Mind with Body] that the Blacks, personifying the Body and thereby in closer communion with their biological roots than other Americans, provide the saving link, the bridge between man’s biology and his machines” (234).

In spite of the subtext of this kind of racialized technophobia in Streetlethal and Gorgon

Child, Firedance ’s representation of the Black male body is one that is rather more open to serving as site for discourse on cybernetic augmentation. This discursive act of engagement with

Black masculinity as sign and signifier occurs on two levels: the novel’s literal work in representing Aubry as a Black cyborg, and the more figurative, allegorical implications of the

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Black cyborg as means of prosthetically reconnecting the history of severance seen in the

African Diaspora. I posit that it is of no mean significance that Aubry goes so long without becoming cybernetically enhanced himself. Prior to the concluding novel the whole point of

Aubry’s existence was simply to be “the strongest”; true enough, such recognition of strength as abstractly conceived in Barnes’s fiction is hardly the sort of thing to be rendered solely in terms of the somatic, and naturally necessitated the refinement of a more figurative “strength of character” that is emotionally and spiritually derived. But the brute force that Aubry inevitably resorts to in order to handle the challenges the narrative throws at him is foremost a product of his indomitable—and unenhanced or augmented—physique.

And thus it is primarily his Blackness and his “badness” that marked Aubry as Other, even within the diverse spaces of the cyberpunk-esque Los Angeles that he inhabits. Perhaps in- keeping with the implied notions of essentialized Black masculinity as a kind of “pure” state, one with no room for intersectional qualifications in terms of sexuality, the image of a Black man qualifying his super-masculine somatic with technology would read as an unwarranted complication of somatics. John Henry achieved iconic status not by also wielding steam- powered automata; Aubry Knight, by the logic of this rendering, ought to be capable of the same.

Rendering the Black organic body here as normative (if superlative in its physique) creates a linkage between Blackness and flesh that is quite antithetical to popular American renderings of the cyborg. In the course of Firedance , however, Aubry finally becomes a cyborg in order to stage his return to the continent at the behest of the American government, who has conscripted his services to stage its own covert operations in PanAfrica. He undergoes a mild enhancement operation, whereby his brain is cyberized to allow for enhanced reflexes and foreign-language comprehension. The allegorical implications of this somatic reconstruction through the use of

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technological prostheses takes on the significance of symbolically reconnecting the African

American and African communities of the Afrodiaspora. The contrasts between visibly modified characters (none of whom, it should be noted, are identified as black, save Leslie’s multiraciality) and Aubry, complemented by the way that Barnes’s prose lingers in its exacting attempts to capture each blow of any given fight sequence, bespeak the significance of the black somatic within his narrative style. Rendering Aubry for so long as unaltered in his physiology— so categorically un -cyberised—through every trial he had hitherto faced within the series, potentially indicates a need to have the character stand apart from so much of the cyberpunk conventionality that surrounds him.

So in terms of aesthetics and the nature of his visuality within the narrative’s science- fictive reality, Aubry exists at a crossroads. He is highly visible to the manifestations of the

American state, and its predatory neo-colonialist intentions on PanAfrica. His augmentations, while not as immediately visible to the characters who encounter him as part of his tasks of espionage and sabotage, take on a highly visible status for the reader, given their significance as novum and markers of the adventure’s explicitly science fiction dimensions.

To the people he encounters in PanAfrica, however, the physical augmentations of his body are rendered as invisible, and serve as means to allow him to communicate with local populations as though he were already culturally a part of them. Additionally, and in point of substantive contrast to the above-mentioned somatic and psychological enhancements garnered through Aubry’s physical cyberization process, it would be a disservice to the approach of reading the text as an exemplar of Black Mecha to proceed without acknowledging the most visible instance of robotics technology in the novel.

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Paul C. Taylor’s work with the question of Black Aesthetics becomes quite helpful for us here in exploring this facet of the character’s stature within the novel (36-37). The ability to negotiate the novel’s implicit ocularcentrism and have a hulking fighter like Aubry “blend in” as a functionally invisible interloper and provocateur within PanAfrica would certainly be possible for him to an extent (notwithstanding his already self-evident status as a clone of President

Swarna). But this is only a matter of, as Fanon would say, his epidermal schema (112). A bit of internal monologue speaks to his diasporic conundrum: “These [the Ibandi] were his people. Yet the people of America were his people, too. Black, white. Brown” (Barnes 312). In spite of his commonalities with the PanAfricans based upon purely superficial racialized dimensions, as

Barnes indicated in the interview I conducted with him, Aubry is culturally and nationally

American in his affiliations (Personal Interview, February 3, 2018). There is an instance in the novel when he confronts Go, and the latter says of him, “look at your skin. You speak the white man’s language, and you think his thoughts, except that your body doesn’t belong to his family.

Do you not feel that there is something more?” (Barnes 269). Indeed, it is precisely because of this tension between the facets of his identity that the Intelligence brass compel him to undergo the cyberisation processes. This is not because of some perceived latent call for him to “sell-out,” as indeed his commanders worry that he may actually betray them and defect, citing a presumption of racial determinism regarding ideologies, but because he has a vested interest in stopping Swarna, who has already come after his new family once, and has threatened to do so again (166).

One Bad Mutha’ (Shut Yo Mouth): Deconstructing and Reconstructing Technological Black Maleness in Streetlethal and Gorgon Child

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The discussion of life in the world of the Aubry Knight trilogy has heretofore been bounded as a means of articulating an anti-Cartesian bifurcation of selfhood that potentially challenges the paradigms of cyberpunk aesthetics. The notion of the body as playing a significant

(if also significantly vexed) role in the expression of Aubry’s characterization, rebukes the rather more self-evidently techno-pessimism of the works of Gibson and Sterling. However, such a discussion of the body’s role within Barnes’s trilogy is incomplete without acknowledging the intersectional ways that his use of the somatic is expressed.

Aubry’s body is racially legible with minimal effort, if for no other reason than his apparent singularity as a heroic Black character in the first two novels of the trilogy. But what is perhaps even more readily discernible as we are introduced to him, is the overwhelming textual and thematic emphasis being placed upon him as a male character. The intersection here allows for productive interpretations of the kinds of Black masculinity discernible in the progression of the series. Among these, I would also propose a reading of Aubry in conversation with the venerable trope of the “Badman/Bad Nigger.” I argue also, that in many ways, Aubry Knight also signifies on Jack Johnson, the early twentieth century pugilist and first Black Heavyweight

Champion.

Jerry Bryant’s “ Born in a Mighty Bad Land ” and its study of the so-called “badman” figure in Black literature and folklore is a helpful means by which to stage the preliminary portions of this reading. But where Bryant seeks to read a badman dichotomy as split between the Lawrence

W. Levine’s “moral hard man” and Roger D. Abrahams’s simple “hard man,” I find that Aubry represents something in-between these poles (2-3). The “hard man,” as a figuration of “bad” or unconstrained Black masculinity, is a figure of nihilistic violence, willing to turn his “violence and surliness not only upon whites who get in his way, but also against the people in his own

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Black community” (3). By contrast, the moral hard man, is a Black badman who invests his hostility and capacity for violence primarily towards the ends of racial liberation and undermining white supremacy (2). While Aubry lives by violence and has no compunction about ending life to accomplish his ends, he does not fit neatly into a box at either end of Bryant’s framework: he cares too much to be just a hard man, but is perhaps too apolitical to be read as a really moral hard man. He uses his fists to fight against systems of oppression—the Ortega syndicate, the rogue soldiers of the Medusa project, and Swarna’s autocracy—but does so less out of a sense of actuated revolutionary spirit to make lives better for Black people, or other subaltern groups, and more out of a sense of protecting the family and friends in his immediate social circle. So while he might skew in the direction of moral hardness, we might hesitate to put him in the company of others like Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Tupac Shakur that Bryant and Levine identify as being of that ilk. But it is worth noting that also mentioned in the list of moral hard men is none other than Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion of the world (2). Johnson was certainly a fighter who (arguably) likewise toed a line between self and community, and some of the other parallels between he and Aubry are quite telling.

Though Johnson and Aubry are certainly similar, I would hesitate to go so far as to suggest that they be read entirely as part of a a one-to-one correlation. William H. Wiggins Jr. provides a list of four characteristics that define Johnson as an ur-example of the “bad nigger” archetype:

“an utter disregard of death and danger; a great concentration on sexual virility; a great extravagance in buying cars, clothing, etc.; and an insatiable love of having a good time” (36).

Aubry could certainly be read as reflecting the first two, what with the novels’ extensive chronicling of his stature as a fighter and the extended emphasis on sexuality through his amorous pursuit of Promise, the dalliance with Cyloxibin, and the experiences in Ephesus and

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the NewMan Nation. But in as far as the other two elements are concerned—those having to do with fun and consumerist extravagance—the neither Streetlethal nor Gorgon Child , and certainly not Firedance entertain an image of Aubry that is commensurate with Johnson’s freewheeling dandyism.

But perhaps the most immediately important signifier of the thematic connection between

Johnson and Aubry is the latter’s profession as a nullboxer. Pugilism as signifier of strength and virility is yet another element of Cleaver’s schematic rendering of Black masculinity that serves as a helpful way of unpacking Barnes’s fiction, for as he states, “the boxing ring is the ultimate focus of masculinity in America, the two-fisted testing ground of manhood, and the heavyweight champion, as a symbol, is the real Mr. America” (108). Within the novels, nullboxing (and

Aubry’s other “two-fisted” arts of belligerence) takes all of that metaphorical significance of historical boxing and emphasizes its role as a definitive somatic expression of Black masculine power. It also harkens to the expressions of a more polycultural site of resistance through

Aubry’s ultimate syncretizing of this variation on Western combat with Asian and African martial arts; the whole of this creation of a kinesthetic resistance is very much in line with Vijay

Prashad’s thesis on martial arts as vehicle for bare brown fists against the armored carapace of imperialist domination (more on this in the following chapter).

But in the matter of Aubry’s status as a (null)boxer, there are potential concerns that might arise relative to that kind of signification, too. On the one hand, we note, the association of his employment so immediately with his sheer physicality and feats of physics-defying brute force

(the rumors about such fighters bespeak abilities and necessities of overcoming inertial barriers to strike with pinpoint force in microgravity) bespeaks a monumental potential for performing herculean feats of heroic strength. On the other hand, the rendering of his Blackness and

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masculinity as so intrinsically imbricated in his somatic articulations does run the risk of rendering him a reductivist caricature. Barnes’s work with him walks this line, though, and usually with some effect. The character avoids the pitfalls of reductivisim by virtue of the narrative’s relentless forward momentum, which seeks to drag him towards being a “better” and

“more complete” man, who achieves balance in all facets of his subjective experiences: bodily, mental, and spiritual.

But whereas there might easily have been a reductivist reading of Aubry as just his body

(after the venerable troping of the supermasculine menial put forth by Eldridge Cleaver),

Barnes’s utility of him as a hero figure necessitates him both being and becoming more than the aggregate portions of his somatic existence. Left to his own devices, at the beginning of

Streetlethal , the would-be champion nullboxer is satisfied with an existence defined by financial security and heterosexual romantic/erotic endeavors with his erstwhile lover, Maxine Black.

Aubry is a “goon” at the saga’s outset, mere hired muscle (read: Black flesh) for the Ortega crime syndicate. But, betrayed by Maxine and other figures within the cartel, he is shipped off to prison—the belly of the beast—where he must expend all of his considerable energies in the quotidian tasks of simply staying alive in Death Valley supermax. In this instance, he really is just a body, resisting the crushing effects that his incarceration might have on mind and spirit by sequestering them away in safer reaches of inviolate interiority.

Ultimately, as a result of taking prison justice into his own hands and exacting revenge upon a fellow inmate, Aubry is subjected to a form of torturous reconditioning. In a sequence analogous to 1984 or A Clockwork Orange , he is bombarded with visual images meant to evoke an adrenal response towards violence or anger, and then, once the natural somatic reaction is elicited, he is subject to painful corporal reprisals (and shocked if he looks away). The torture is

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designed to create mutual antipathy between body and mind, and sunder their ability to synchronize their faculties towards the ends of violent reprisal against the system of domination that the prison itself comes to represent. Here again, the recurrent iconography of a Douglass- esque trope of the Black body being violently separated from the mind, in order to establish a kind of docility. Aubry, like Douglass (and ironically enough, like Aidan), is made slave through the destruction of this link.

Indeed, it is arguable that this psychosomatic trauma itself that defines Aubry's character throughout Streetlethal . Aubry's body, that mighty fortress of muscle (read: Black flesh) it is repeatedly described as being, is rendered compromised in the instances when it would be most useful. His inability to access his full range of emotional responses as catalyzing agents for the utility of his fighter's prowess not only represents an existential dilemma for him (he is a fighter, before he is anything else), but it also puts his life in very real danger as he repeatedly "freezes up" before adversaries. It is an encumbrance that he spends the rest of the novel struggling to overcome.

The depiction of a predatory and punitive application of sadistic science upon Black bodies incapable of defending themselves is itself a trope that likely contributes to the technophobia and anxiety over bodily integrity that sees Aubry resisting cyberization for as long as he does. It also,

I propose, highlights a subtext of Black iatrophobia (to borrow the term from Harriet A.

Washington’s Medical Apartheid ) that stems from blatant manifestations of white supremacy and institutional racism within the medical fields stemming as far back as the earliest days of

Black interaction with European medical sciences (47). Fictional representations of this are occasionally found in texts of Black speculative fiction—such as the threat of dissection in

Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (89), and the surreal palliative equipment that is used on

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the protagonist of Ellison’s Invisible Man (233)—but are explicitly highlighted in such Marvel

Comics graphic novels as Truth: Red, White, and Black, which chronicles the human experimentation that produced the so-called “Black Captain America,” Isaiah Bradley 38 .

The comic book superhero Luke “Power Man” Cage is perhaps an even more apt analogue for Aubry’s brushes with medical experimentation. Like Aubry, Luke Cage has his origins in a suspiciously biased brush with the American criminal justice system. Sentenced to a prison stretch, Luke is taken for an experimental procedure that will have potential effects upon his body. A racist corrections officer sabotages the experiment, and Luke barely survives an explosion that ultimately gives him the superpower of indestructibility, making him effectively a bulletproof Black man (Lendrum 367).

The upshot is, in spite of the fact that Luke Cage and Aubry Knight have radically different outcomes, both are subjugated to experimentation at the hands of a particularly pernicious brand of white-supremacy-inflected scientism. Such experiments conducted upon the bodies of Black men complicate their respective relationships with their own bodies, and force a critical reassessment of the nature of their strength within the contexts of the narratives. Aubry, like Luke Cage, does go on to become something of a hero; but neither man is without the residual trappings of the wandering Badman archetype, nor do they tack too far from the purview of the controlling image of Black masculinity as defined by the iconography of being the spiritual successor of the trope of the restive Buck (Lendrum 367).

38 Bradley, in an attempt to craft a super-soldier serum like the kind that empowered Steve Rogers to become Captain America, is subject to a fictional clandestine military experimentation program during WWII. Although he ultimately finds the comic’s potential for racial critique to be undercut by problematic visual representations of wartime violence, Black comics scholar Adilifu Nama does acknowledge the significant work that it does in “dredg[ing] up deep racial anxieties that have historically existed between Black Americans and the American medical establishment” (117)

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The through-line from Aubry to Luke Cage as self-assured Black man might almost seem to suggest a common genealogy that could be drawn from these characters back to the tropes of

Blaxploitation cinema and attendant literary formations. Such connections for Cage have already been made by both William Jones ( The Ex-Con…and the African King: A Social, Cultural, and

Political Analysis of Four Black Comic Book Heroes ) and Adilifu Nama ( Super Black: American

Pop Culture and Black Superheroes ), and done so with considerable effect. But I think that to apply the connection to Aubry seems a bridge too far. The latter certainly evokes the “cool” of a

Shaft and the latent capacity for violence of a Sweet Sweetback. But these characters—and their anticipatory and subsequent literary analogues—differ from the cyberpunk badman in one key aspect: they are products of a primarily Black community, and exercise their supermasculine prowess (ostensibly) on behalf of that community.

While the Los Angeles described in the novels is one of polycultural diversity, it feels a bit disingenuous, to call Aubry’s world a futuristic ghetto, or a simple extrapolation of the kind within the blaxploitation landscapes the Luke Cage comic signifies upon. The world is a blighted, distinctly urban space, to be sure, and both suggests and depicts a systemic stratification of society that keeps certain peoples down while facilitating the rise of others. But the community that Aubry attaches himself to, and eventually becomes a leader of, is made up of a kind of ethnic and racial diversity that is rather out of alignment with the literature of The

Street. But in spite of the ubiquity of all sorts of people of color, in Streetlethal , Aubry is one of the only Black characters introduced, and is the only Black man. 39 Blackness in this novel and its sequel is very nearly tokenized, solely the province of the protagonist. A reduction to a singular

39 I hesitate to say only Black character in this first novel, because femme fatale Maxine Black is coded as racially ambiguous, and it is difficult to say with certainty as to whether (coincidentally) her surname has any bearing on her racial identity.

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presence potentially necessitates the careful conceptual handling of a reading of these early adventures, as to avoid conflation of other aspects of Aubry’s identity. Nevertheless, however, I posit that there is much to gain from a sustained critical engagement with the characterization here, and its larger implications in the depictions of Blackness, Black masculinity, and a Black embodied subjectivity.

A (Really) Bad Man: Toxic Masculinity and the Dangerous Dynamics in Aubry Knight’s Afrofuturist Maleness

The matter of Aubry’s form of masculine expression in Gorgon Child, in particular, is paradoxically defined by aspects of intersectional Black masculinity that stumble into inexplicable returns to tired tropes of stereotypical hypersexuality and reified assertions of internalized heteronormativity. Worse yet, it is in this novel that we see Barnes’s putative hero figure stoop to the lowest point in the framing of his moral arc. Given the nature of the conversation about embodiment, Blackness, and masculinity, it is necessary to discuss this particular incident, grossly problematic and off-putting though it is to do so.

The events of Gorgon Child have their antecedents in Streetlethal, though, which set the stage for Aubry’s enmity towards various people in his life whom he feels have betrayed him.

There is certainly something to be said about the deployment of a narrative of Black male

“anger” as trope and cliche here, to be sure, but as the story develops, we see that anger being focused in a not-terribly-subtle misogynistic direction inasmuch as it localizes itself most acutely in the direction of Maxine, the novel’s tech-noir femme-fatale. The novel itself seems unsure of where to land with her as a character (is she a tragic figure, undone by a sense of guilt for betraying Aubry? Or is she a capricious ne’er-do-well “harlot” who is undone by drugs and licentiousness?), but in the end, she ultimately dies, mourned only by Promise. Aubry, in

Streetlethal and Gorgon Child , repeats on more than one instance that one of the only things

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sustaining him during his stint in Death Valley Penitentiary is the thought of his own ability to fatally serve Maxine her “comeuppance.” When circumstances deny him this brutal reprisal, he transfers that anger into multiple other directions.

One of the most disturbing of these is during his brief meeting with reporter, Marina

Batiste. On the lam from a rogue special ops unit that has chased him from Promise’s home in the all-female commune of Ephesus, Oregon, Aubry takes in with the all-male separatist group, the NewMen in their “nation” within Arizona. Aubry runs into Marina and the two begin to share information about the government’s involvement in a host of shady dealings, inclusive of using the special forces as a means to threaten the existence of the NewMen’s enclave. But when the two of them look to continue their conversation away from the public bar they had met in, the memories of Maxine suddenly—and nearly inexplicably—reassert themselves in Aubry’s mind, and he ultimately attacks and violates Marina (238).

The scene is utterly gratuitous in its inclusion if not necessarily graphic in its execution, and the whole thing raises far more questions than actually providing meaningful development to either the narrative or characterization. The novel might well be read as attempting to demonstrate the breadth of the gulf that Aubry has yet to cross before finding a more holistic sense of identity beyond merely his carnal/somatic existence; however, the racialized element of his identity (and the “body of history” it represents) are all the same dangerously close to signifying on historically damaging controlling images of Black masculinity. When we recall the utility of hooks’ expression “it’s a dick thing,” which places being “a man” at a dangerous crossroads of white supremacy and patriarchy, to see Aubry reduced to attempting to find a sense of manhood in a moment of monstrous misogynistic anger is disappointing to say the absolute least. What exacerbates the problems of the scene is the ultimate lack of consequence that it

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carries. Aubry gains no real closure from the act, and although she threatens him with a gun in the immediate aftermath, Marina apparently acquiesces to a tense working relationship with

Aubry to take down a mutual adversary. The rape is not mentioned again until the final pages of the novel where Marina offers the following by way of absolution: “Whoever it was who raped me, he isn’t here anymore. And whoever it was who was raped...she’s not here anymore”

(ellipsis original) (339). Surprisingly, she also writes the press release for Aubry and Promise’s wedding (343). By Firedance, the narrative seems to have dropped the character Marina Batiste in her entirety.40

In a series of ostensible progressiveness in exploring the realities of cybernetic- and hormonally enhanced gender identities within the context of a futuristic America, this flagrant instance of toxic Black masculinity is all the more astounding. Aubry, in spending his time among the NewMen is shown to be exceptionally discomfited in the presence of their otherwise completely normalized queerness. While it is possible to read his self-evident anxieties as stemming in part from his time in hiding and the somatic threats posed by the state-sanctioned forces looking to take his life, Barnes’s prose suggests that the more immediate source of his fraying nerves are the existential threats to his heterosexual masculinity he perceives in sustained social and physical proximity to the NewMen’s gay culture (230). The sense of separation and isolation in the midst of throngs of men who share his same stature and physique leaves him feeling as though he “wanted to touch someone” (italics original), even though such vulnerability and recognition of a not-entirely-heteronormative masculinity directly confounds that desire

40 It is worth noting (by way of clarifying, though not exculpating), that Barnes himself has stated in an interview with this author that he does not go back and read his old works once they have been published. As a result, certain plot points or narratively-significant threads in one novel may not necessarily be completely resolved in a sequel. (February 3, 2018)

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(234). Even his dear friend and trusted warrior-ally, Miles Bloodeagle, is ultimately viewed with suspicion through Aubry’s pervasive homophobia. In an exchange:

“What did you find?” Miles asked. “Just...checked things out. The lay of the land. Found out that the lay of the land was me.” (ellipsis original) “You are quite a hunk.” Aubry squeezed his eyes shut. “Miles, I’m flattered. I’m also trying to figure out things I’ve never even thought about. So do me a favor and don’t start with me, all right?” (230)

Disturbingly, the novel thus seems to suggest that it is likewise a reaction to ubiquitous queerness that Aubry must “prove himself” by taking sexual license against Marina. In raping her, to his warped perception, his is simultaneously enacting a restitution of his masculinity subsequent Maxine’s symbolic act of castration, and asserting a pathological sense of separation from the queer Others he is living amongst.

Such an attempt to reify and reassert arbitrary boundaries qua sexual identity relative to his embodied subjectivity are likewise vexing in the ways that they continue to complicate a reading of these two early novels in the context of narratives of either Black mecha or cyberpunk fusion.

But insofar as the novels have yet to recognize Aubry as being a cyborg in the midst of the technologized and boundary-effacing realities of the world around him, it is perhaps not surprising that he yet remains a pathologized instance of reactionary conservatism within an otherwise progressive futurescape.

And yet, as toxic as Aubry’s nadir of essentialized masculinity becomes, with its manifestly repugnant instances of brutal misogyny and queerantagonism, the conclusion of

Gorgon Child , suggests that there may be other identity machinations at work (344). Barnes has indicated that this novel is representative of a pivot in his career as a writer; a point which becomes acutely apparent in the dramatic shifts in tone and subject matter that Firedance undertakes . In an interview, he shared with me that he had, prior to that point, felt unable to do

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justice to a narrative of racial identity, because he had, “sacrificed his Blackness on the altar of his testosterone” (February 3, 2018). He explained that it took some time to be able to write a story that did not just feature a Black human being, but one that dealt with the broader social realities of a human being Black.

Firedance redirects Aubry’s saga away from the potentially reductive images of Blackness

(and Black masculinity) seen in its predecessors. Whereas Streetlethal and Gorgon Child had moved to simply create a space for diversity by challenging extant and prevailing themes of

Cartesianism and similar stands of Euro-American liberal humanist traditions within a markedly provincial tone with their efforts to explore cyberpunk futurescapes of Los Angeles circa 2030, the series’s conclusion looks further abroad. 41 As such, Firedance does considerably more than simply emulate cyberpunk and is arguably the most nuanced text in its depiction of Afrofuturist diaspora. Its adaptation of Gilroy’s rhizomatic connections into the language of Black mecha motifs of Middle Passage allegorization and prosthetic communities created an opportunity to stand apart as something markedly distinct from the rest of the trilogy.

At stake in this construction of Aubry as a figure of historical embodiment is the encoding of the narrative of diasporic reconnection primarily in terms of patrilineality. Of course, there is a rather glaring inherent problematic of the elision of Black womanhood from this narrative of reconnection (one that we might see better articulated through Braithwaite’s reading of cyborg- ism in Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber ); but, in acknowledging this problematic lacuna, Barnes’s rather provocative attempt at constructing a continuity of African and African American identity

41 Barnes’s positioning of the fictional superstate of PanAfrica as the setting for much of the more overtly transnational action in Firedance bespeaks an engagement with a chronopolitics of twentieth century black nationalism. The name of the amalgamation of various adjacent present-day East African countries into a regional economic, military, and technological superpower signifies upon historical ideologies of commonality and unity amongst black peoples of the Afrodiaspora, as espoused by early and mid-twentieth century cultural nationalists.

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through masculine genealogies is nonetheless intellectually intriguing and gives additional

Afrofuturist significance to Firedance .

Conclusions

In this chapter I have endeavored to stage a reading of Barnes’s Aubry Knight novels in the aggregate, while highlighting the stark differentiation that separates Firedance from the

Streetlethal and Gorgon Child. Narratively, the trilogy makes some provocative moves relative to understandings of Gibson-esque cyberpunk SF conventions, in that throughout all three texts,

Cartesian dualism is tabled in favor for a much more visceral exploration of the aesthetics of somatics and embodied experiences. Likewise, even though the novels work to create an image of the future that is defined in many respects by dystopian corporate overreach and various public health crises, they go to pains to find progressive approaches in depictions of multiculturalism and positioning of a Black man in the position of hardboiled (anti)hero. The technological wonderland of the city of Los Angeles may be rotting, but Barnes demonstrates that the efforts of diverse people—cyborg and not—are what it takes to begin to combat the corruption.

But the picture in the first two novels is messy all the same. For all the good Barnes is attempting to do by situating the Black body in the imagined spaces of the future cityscape, it takes more than just “showing up” to make texts that do constructive Afrofuturist work in unseating the residual problems with SF in general and cyberpunk in particular. The first two novels drop the ball in their representational methodologies by hyperfocusing on the experiences of Aubry’s body as an individual , and offer little but rearticulated controlling images of toxic

Black machismo in their parochial worldviews. Aubry has demons—as humanized characters do—but the fact that these foibles are so readily discernible as problematic manifestations of

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historicized visual rhetorics of domination directed towards Black men serve to magnify their implications. So much the more so when there is such a dearth of other Black figures to contrast

Aubry against.

Streetlethal and Gorgon Child have him wrestling to use his body to become something more than just a weapon, and while this has him toeing the moral line at the edges of being the futuristic iteration of the trope of the buck/Bad Nigger, it is in his rendering as heteronormative male father and husband that the novel attempts an ex post facto validation of Aubry as a man.

And while this reflects a definite arc for his character (one that perhaps has the added implications of subverting residual specters of Moynihan-Report-inspired stereotypes of Black masculinity), the bigger ramifications of this, admittedly co-optable, reification of patriarchal status are not fully sussed until the narrative is reframed in the aftermath of Firedance ’s continuity shuffling.

I have gone to lengths to substantiate the significance of reading Firedance as a paradigm- shifter in the Aubry Knight cycle, but this is most readily evident in the utility of its fatherhood- as-history approach to Afrofuturist chronopolitics. The novel’s Transatlantic dimensions work as allegory because of the significance of the Black mecha motif of embodied history. As such, the narrative of diasporic severance is encoded into the fictive articulations of Aubry’s own life story. With these points in mind, it becomes clear that Firedance , for all its immediate connection to certain plot threads within the Aubry Knight trilogy, is nevertheless a novel that dramatically seeks to separate itself from its preceding installments. The former works, with their rather cursory engagement with racial identity politics do seem to somewhat more readily suggest a kind of gravitational pull of the cyberpunk conventions that they emerged parallel to.

This is not to suggest that they are in any way apolitical (in being adjacent to cyberpunk, it

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would be difficult to separate their critiques of Reagan-era capitalism and deregulation); but it is evident that the way that these novels explore their politics and their defamiliarization of then- contemporary social issues such as AIDS, the crack epidemic, and popular expressions of certain strands of feminism, in ways that seem largely disinterested in reading these as in any way connected to racializing concerns, it is certainly bemusing to the reader looking to position them within the canon of Black Atlantic Speculative Fiction.

But Firedance is a different beast. In the concluding novel of Aubry’s saga, Barnes infuses

(for his oeuvre at the time) such a concentrated dose of racial awareness as to make the novel seem to actively chafe against its connections to the antecedent texts. Whereas Streetlethal and

Gorgon Child are interested in the matters of embodiment, Firedance encodes these issues with a chronopolitics of Transatlantic Blackness; the very plot itself contorts to force the issue of Africa as an historicized site of Diaspora and Return. Aubry’s roots are shown to be not of the Los

Angeles, or American West Coast, but literally back across the Atlantic, and his journey—per the new plot-specific dictates of Firedance—can only end by retracing the routes back to the continent.

Such a radical series of changes, naturally, shakes the trunk of the established narrative.

Evidence of this is apparent in Barnes’s rather blatant attempts to stage retroactive continuity shifts that directly impact the things that readers thought they knew about Aubry (quite dramatically). But I find these instances to be quite fascinating in their implications, as they suggest a potential metatextual engagement with the trope of the cyborg.

And yet it would be slightly over-selling the distinction between the conclusion of the

Aubry Knight cycle from the other two should we disregard the ways in which its approach of change is supplemented by a process of narrative and thematic continuity. While the novel is a

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departure in its politics and understanding of racializing assemblages as part of its broader,

Transatlantic sensibilities, those understandings are articulated in revisiting and fleshing out previous elements. The narrative dimensions of masculinity and the search for patriarchal support are certainly an example of this, as is the preoccupation with the male somatic and its latent and overt capability for violence. But whereas Streetlethal looked at masculinity as capacity for combat and enacting vengeance against personal wrongs, and Gorgon Child explored the sense of male identity within futuristic defamiliarizations of heterosexual romantic/erotic love and paternal authority and obligations, Firedance encodes Black masculinity as an historicized process . One that connects in both roots and routes back to the

Diasporic homeland.

In Firedance , the Black male is not the one who must defend his specific family against slings and arrows of the personal attacks by the dystopian American nation-state. He is, instead, a node within a constellation of historical continua, anti-colonial struggle, and the hybridity of burgeoning technogenesis. He—and here, Aubry specifically—is literally at the spatiotemporal crossroads of past-present-future and Africa-America axes.

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CHAPTER 6

PANAFRICA FOREVER:

FIREDANCE, BLACK PANTHER, AND BLACK MECHA’S AFROASIAN

AFROFUTURISM

Yo, it's three thousand thirty / I want y'all to meet Deltron Zero, hero, not no small feat / It's all heat in this day and age / I'll raid your grave, anything it takes to save the day / Neuromancer, perfect blend of technology and magic / Use my rapping so you all can see the hazards / Plus entertainment where many are brainless / We cultivated a lost art of study and I brought a buddy / Automator, harder slayer, fascinating combinations / Cyber warlords are aggravating abominations / Arm a nation with hatred? We ain't with that / We high-tech archaeologists searching for knick-knacks / Composing musical stimpacks that impacts the soul / Crack the mold of what you think you rapping for / I used to be a mech soldier but I didn't respect orders / I had to step forward, tell them this ain't for us / Living in a post-apocalyptic world morbid and horrid / The secrets of the past they hoarded / Now we just boarded on a futuristic spacecraft / No mistakes black it's our music we must take back —Del the Funkee Homosapien “3030”

Introduction

In the 2018 Marvel Studios film, Black Panther, there is a protracted sequence set in the

Korean city of Busan. T’Challa, the real name of the eponymous superhero and king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, is on a mission to extract an international arms dealer, making a major deal for a large amount of the near-magical fantasy metal, vibranium. Black

Panther and his associates must sneak into an underground Korean gambling den, wait for the moment of the illicit dealings, and then capture the villain to bring him back to Wakanda to face justice. In order to stage this bit of derring-do, T’Challa is kitted out with his Black Panther super-suit: a form-fitting black-and-chrome number, that is bulletproof, sports indestructible claws, and absorbs the kinetic energy of attacks levied at it (to release that energy later in the form of a devastating sonic pulse attack). The suit is a powerful Afrofuturistic manifestation of

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wearable technology that empowers T’Challa with the form of the fictional Wakandan panther god, and the function of the pulpy, SF superhuman.

While the Black Panther suit is shown in action most extensively within the borders of

Wakanda itself, there was something consummately intriguing about the film’s plopping its hero down in a city on the Korean peninsula. The ultramodern (potentially “futuristic”) nocturnal cityscape, with its neon signs and alternating grit-and-glitz, serves as the sort of signifier that further underscores the visual rhetorics of SF technophilia. That the Panther power-suit, for all of its signification on layered manifestations of Afrodiasporic Blackness is not conveyed as markedly out-of-place amidst the Hangul characters 42 and other markers of East Asian metropolitan landscapes walks a line between fetishizing the “Techno-Orientalist” Other, and potentially serving to recognize the film itself as a cross-cultural contact zone for Transpacific theoretical discourse.

I am fascinated by this representation of a speculative point of contact, and its broader implications. That, for example, while the movie does utilize the iconography of the near- cyberpunk representations of contemporary South Korean modernity, it does so in juxtaposition with the thoroughly Afrofuturistic cityscapes of Wakanda itself, complicates (foils?) any facile attempts to code Asian alterity as uniquely alien. The film instead seems to want to normalize both modes of nonwhite modernity/futurism, and provides the audience with a sense of connectivity of a sort that, outside of Barnes’s own Firedance , is a blend of AfroAsian SF that is fairly unique in popular American media.

For a point of comparison, we consider a similar sequence of high-stakes, frenetic cyborg action that Barnes writes involving Aubry Knight. In Firedance , after a failed border-crossing at

42 The phonetic characters that constitute the written script of the Korean language.

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the edges of the fictional technocratic superstate of PanAfrica, Aubry finds himself held in a detention center with no hope of breaking free of its constraints. It is not until his one-time adversary and genetic doppelganger, Go 43 , arrives with a mechanized suit of Japanese

(Mitsubishi) powered armor to effect his extraction that he can continue his American-sponsored mission of infiltration and assassination (263). Within the suit’s armored carapace, Go smashes into the fortified center, shrugging off machine gun fire, rocket-propelled ordnance, and the rest of its garrison’s fusillade to rescue Aubry. The powered exoskeleton that he pilots protects him from the worst of the assault, but the narrative stakes are continuously raised for the scene, as

Barnes reminds the reader that, for all of the mechanical might that its Black cyborg controller can bring to bear, he is still very human and entirely capable of being harmed—ultimately killed—in spite of his external, mechanized defenses.

However, I pose that there may very well be considerably more at stake here than mere mechanical sturm und drang. Much like T’Challa and his Panther suit, the all-too-human mortality of both Go and Aubry’s Black cyborg bodies contrast dramatically against the sturdier chassis of the powered armor itself. A contrast which evokes the iconography so readily evident within the hyperkinetic spectacle of such powered-armor worn/piloted by human beings seen in the tropes and elements of mecha in Japanese anime series, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion

(1995). Japanese mecha, as juxtaposed with what I am proposing to be its Afrodiasporic speculative fiction counterpart, relies centrally upon the figuration of the “armored body,” which brings with it a host of additional allegorical somatic concerns.

43 Go is the fifth of the clones, which his name signifies as it is the Japanese word for the number “five.”

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In acknowledging Japanese mecha and American cyberpunk’s at times parallel thematics and aesthetics of technologized (post)humanity, as Napier, Carl Silvio 44 (117), and Tatsumi

Takayuki describe, I find highly productive questions inherent in re-situating that discourse on cyborg-prosthetic somatics precisely at the intersection of Afrofuturism and AfroAsia. Picking up such Transpacific rearticulations of Black pasts as future’s prologue becomes a means of highlighting an exciting point of cross-cultural collaboration in the creation of futures populated by the peoples of the African Diaspora and the western edges of the Pacific Rim. These futures, like all of the futures and general otherwhens of Steven Barnes’s fiction, are intensely indebted to an understanding and recursive expression of the past. And that past is most readily experienced directly through the figuration of embodiment, as the characters themselves become physical manifestations of the histories that they represent.

Whereas the two previous chapters sought first to make claims about a specific kind of

AfroAsian historical connections (and proleptic re connections) highlighted within Iron Shadows and the to examine the motif of cyberization of Black bodies in the Aubry Knight novels, this final chapter synthesizes those two approaches with Firedance as the central text. I present here a more comprehensive examination of what I will be referring to as “Black mecha,” and do so as a forward-looking coda of potential application of Transpacific mecha motifs and Afrofuturist

AfroAsia as aesthetic frameworks. Black mecha, as a means of exploring themes of overtly racialized work with the themes of cyberization and power-suit/“armored-body” technology, allows for the symbolic representations of (re)connections across the African Diaspora. By

44 Silvio’s writing about the anime/cyberpunk-fusion short film anthology, The Animatrix , unpacks the representational approaches in the figurations of cybernetic bodies and posthumanisms therein. In speaking to such approaches, he writes of the various emotional responses to cyborg somatics by analysing their utility within anime as a medium: “Anime’s posthuman bodies, like posthuman bodies in other modes of fantastic narrative, thus represent our hopes and fears of what will become of us as posthumans” (117).

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embracing the polycultural aspects of Afrofuturist AfroAsia and resisting being primarily beholden to prevailing neo-Enlightenment concepts within cyberpunk, I posit that Black mecha might meaningfully and productively be engaged in creating spaces for new and different kinds of future imaginaries.

Facing East: Unpacking the tropes of Japanese Mecha within the context of Afrofuturism’s Prosthetic Communities

In order to add to the body of scholarship on Barnes’s Aubry Knight trilogy, I have crafted what I hope to be a nascent terminology for the motif of cybernetic fusions of Black somatics. In a forthcoming article, “Black Mecha is Built for This: Black Masculine Identity in Firedance and

Afro Samurai,45 ” in a 2018 special edition of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies , I proffer “Black mecha” into the Afrofuturist lexicon as a means of reading allegorized Black bodies as sites for prosthetic reconnection within the larger Afrodiasporic world. In building upon Alisa Braithwaite’s notion of the “prosthetic community,” I look at Black cyborg figures as embodying not merely the boundary-effacing hybridity of the cyborg more generally, but instead as reflecting a very particular and actively historicized mode of Black ontogenesis (Braithwaite

87).

When read in the context of Afrofuturist fiction, the term “Black mecha” bespeaks the cyborg motif’s intrinsically AfroAsian dimensions, inasmuch as it signifies on a genre and conventions of Japanese literature, graphic novels, and televised anime (animation) programs.

Mecha is a subgenre of science fiction anime that presents the spectacle of mecha nical elements.

45 Afro Samurai is a 2007 anime series directed by Kizaki Fuminori. Within the five episodes, the titular Black samurai—named Afro—pursues a quest for vengeance after his father is brutally cut down in a duel. Afro’s adventures echo Aubry’s in many ways, as the article describes, not least of these being that both are Black men of peak physical capability who must fight their way across landscapes defined by a ubiquity of cyborg figures. Afro, like Aubry, has a complicated relationship with his personal and historical past, and must reconcile with a formative act of severance and separation to attempt to find a prosthetic reconnection with family and Blackness.

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But rather than a generalized understanding of technology, however, Japanese mecha works of foreground what anime scholar Susan J. Napier identifies as “armored bodies”: most frequently, some manner of either technological exoskeleton or cybernetic bodily enhancement. While there is considerable spectacle in these bodies clashing against one another, Napier addresses their utility in making commentary on topics as diverse as warfare, politics, and the coming-of-age of young men in the face of either or both of the preceding (86). Encasing or augmenting the bodies of their operators with technological enhancement, Japanese mecha narratives depict the ironic interplay between empowerment through the mechanical armor and the fragility of the very human body inside.

Thus, Japanese mecha texts serve the purpose of allegorizing the ambivalent social circumstances of male youth by conveying the ambivalent relationships between the human and technological elements (Napier 88). Black mecha texts likewise create a rather ambivalent dimension of human/technology interaction. But instead of drawing quite so directly upon the narrative tropes of bildungsroman, navigating the tense relationship between human and technologized prosthesis instead signifies an attempt to find convalescence (or at least palliation) in the wake of the scarring sociohistorical wound that is diaspora itself. In such instances, the mechanized Black body acquires symbolic or allegorical narrative subtext because Black mecha is directly contingent upon the Braithwaite’s concept of the prosthetic community as a way of imagining somatic and familial reconnections across the various pockets of Black people around the globe.

It is worth clarifying, however, that I am not suggesting that the sum of rising Black speculative fictionists divert from Afrofuturism’s tremendously validating and affirming project of reimagining Black pasts on the canvas of Black futures for the sake of hitching their futurist

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cart exclusively to Japanese pop culture (or any other mode of Asian cultural production either, for that matter). Instead, what I am suggesting here is a globalizing perspective that might function within the larger project of Afroiasporic speculative fiction. In much the same way that not all Japanese science fiction is necessarily (Japanese) mecha, not all Black SF need be Black mecha. But in considering the schema that Barnes has laid out in Firedance and its applicability in Black Panther and across multiple manifestations of Black bodies in powered-armor, I think it might make for a fascinating and productive project to see what other writers might do with this motif.

Indeed, it should be noted that while he is certainly an early standout, Barnes is not necessarily alone in his work as a Black author exploring robotics and power-armor; a fact that might serve well for subsequent analyses of Black mecha’s application in Black SF more broadly. The Steamfunk! anthology presents several short stories—inclusive of Milton Davis’s

“The Delivery”—that imagine steam-powered, clockwork versions of robots in the nineteenth century. Likewise, Nisi Shawl’s Everfair imagines such Victorian mecha conventions in its work imagining technologized prostheses for the victims of King Leopold’s genocidal depravity in the so-called Congo Free State. Finally, in a more overtly futuristic angle that is perhaps more resonant with the world of Aubry Knight, Nicky Drayden’s 2017 novel, The Prey of Gods also can be read as potentially signifying on the Japanese mecha traditions of giant robot battles that seem ripped straight from the screens of a Super Sentai (e.g. Power Rangers ) or “Super Robot”

(e.g. 1972’s Mazinger Z ) television shows. 46 Barnes’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s was

46 The climactic battle in the novel is between the multiracial cyborg character, Muzi McCarthy, and the enraged demigoddess, Sydney Mazwai. Muzi’s human body is one quarter Zulu, three quarters white South African; but his human consciousness has been downloaded into the body of an Alphabot, the novel’s near-future take on robotic personal assistants. To fight Sydney, Muzi creates a computer program that speaks to other non-sentient Alphabots and coordinates them to link together in the form of a single, giant body, cheekily dubbed, “Mega-Muzibot.” This colossal construct is able to fight the highly destructive demigoddess on nearly equal terms (and the visual rhetorics implied by Drayden’s prose could easily be taken from an episode of Power Rangers ).

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concomitant with the then-burgeoning Japanese mecha tropes that Drayden’s piece signifies upon, and thus potentially serves as a significant artifact of the historical moments of Black and

Japanese narrative experimentation with representation of technological somatics.

Barnes’s fictional engagement with mecha’s tropes of the armored body in a way that so overtly calls attention to the implicit Japanese mecha traditions is what most intrigues me about the potential of Firedance . In examining it as a relic of a moment of cross-cultural fascination with AfroAsian somatic boundary effacement, we might well be able to see what it might mean as a blueprint for further Afrofuturist dabbling with the same. Black mecha clearly has much to offer as a motif for investigating and reexamining the Black Atlantic past but envisioning a paradigm of future imaginary that (to borrow from Paul Gilroy’s terminology) rhizomatically links across the Pacific as well, it posits a dynamic and truly polycultural means of proleptically envisioning Blackness at the cybernetic frontier.

But we should perhaps temper the celebratory optimism somewhat. There is, of course, something of an inherent risk here: Barnes’s work might be said to skirt the boundaries of

Mullen’s “Afro-Orientalism,” what Morley and Robins have identified as “Techno-Orientalism,” and even Said’s venerable (and here, unadorned) Orientalism. In light of the Aubry Knight trilogy’s complicated relationship with cyberpunk as a movement, it too represents some of the disconcertingly evident Orientalizing anxieties of the historical moment that produced the novels. Unfortunately, for all of the cause celebre that the (post-)cyberpunks found in the movement’s repudiation of ubiquitous whiteness in SF of the past, and critique of its contemporary climate of consumer capitalism, various media manifestations of that kind of SF revisited the uncomfortable terrain of Japan as economically ascendant. As Adilifu Nama frames

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the racial ambivalence towards “Asian-ness” in the context of a reading of the cyberpunk film

Blade Runner:

Fundamentally, the rain-drenched dystopia of Los Angeles in Blade Runner reflected a growing uneasiness with American postindustrial decline in the face of Asian technological and economic ascendancy of the early 1980s. The beginning of the decade witnessed the rise of the Pacific Rim as an economic juggernaut, particularly in relation to Japan’s burgeoning automobile industry. The phenomenal success of imported Japanese car sales prodded many American consumers and producers to reconsider the socioeconomic pride and power signified by the slogan, “Made in America.”...It appeared that Japan was on the verge of accomplishing economically what it could not accomplish militarily—the defeat of America—and Blade Runner was the projection of that future defeat, represented as cultural subordination to the Pacific Rim vis-a-vis the film’s Asian cityscape. (59)

Barnes’s novels might not go quite so far as Blade Runner ’s Kanji -ideogram-, Ramen noodle stand-, and neon Geisha billboard-suffused fever dreams of Japanese buying up America outright. And while we can actually make the case that Firedance does some rather provocative and progressive work in representing the social stigmas and difficulties of Black-and-Japanese biracial people in Transpacific contexts, the novel nevertheless, walks right up to that line of exoticizing Asian technology as means of furthering an Orientalist alterity. Firedance has instances, for example, wherein it trots out the rather cringe-worthy neologism, “Niptech,” as portmanteau for “technology from Nippon ” (“Nippon,” being “Japan” in Japanese), for example

(106). Such potentially problematic turns seem to be symptomatic of the larger sense of cultural anxiety pervading the depictions of an economically and technologically ascendant Asian Other within cyberpunk and adjacent generic conventions.

Confronted with this fascinatingly complicated layering of representational strategies and potential missteps, I argue that the novels are still especially well-suited for a critical reading and analytical intervention. Furthermore, Barnes’s novels make the occasional explicit gestures towards depicting mecha conventions of a sort quite in-line with Japanese hallmarks of the genre like 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam (giant robotic armor), 1987’s Bubblegum Crisis (powered

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armor), and 1995’s Ghost in the Shell (cyborgs). Whereas these roughly contemporaneous examples with Barnes’s fiction likewise bespeak a complicated nexus of nonwhite bodies as enhanced or augmented by cybernetic accoutrement (and bodies that, I argue, have been confronted and must reconcile a society-wide trauma, in the form of the atomic bombs), the trope within the genre presents itself as a meaningful component for comparative discourse.

All of which—this multimedia depiction of Black bodies as in a simultaneously empowering and ambivalent contiguous connection with prosthetic augmentation and armor— stand as central to a very powerful signifier of what these bodies can be within the iconography of SF literature and visual entertainment. A cross cultural reading of Blackness in the context of mecha as representative of genre beholden to an alternative (non-Anglo-American) epistemology is likewise rife with potential for engaging new paradigms of the Black speculative imagination.

It is also, I contend, through its reorienting of concepts of defamiliarized modernity and the places bodies occupy therein, a mode of depicting futures that is intrinsically liberating from dominating narratives of Euro-/America-centric hierarchy, and facilitates a mutually-affirming horizontal melding of Transpacific ideas. Movement towards an AfroAsian, Afrofuturism through the refinement of the imaginative potential of Black mecha stands to be precisely the sort of inoculation to prevent virulent strains of Orientalist or appropriationist problematics of bygone decades.

Scaffolding the (Re)Connections: Analyzing the Technological Body in Black and Japanese Speculative Spaces

In order to bridge the conversations regarding the manifestations of Barnes’s particular sort of AfroAsia worldview and its expression through the somatic, we return to Nishime’s figurations of the cyborg as a site of interracial fusion. Her readings of the “mulatto cyborg” pick up on the significance of that metaphor’s potentially racializing dimensions in a way I find to be

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a useful foundation (35). But whereas Nishime highlights the tradition of the cyborg trope’s indebtedness to a reading of the white body fused with the Other-as-inorganic-technology, it seems that Barnes’s work is interested in exploring the hybridity of Black body as the de facto starting point. His novels posit fusions of the Black body with technology, yes, but also with

Asian flesh as well. The anxieties surrounding his depictions of Black masculinity as very nearly autochthonous and hermetically sealed in its somatic expression does seem to suggest that such fusion is less than ideal, and is going to be fraught with a host of problems.

But, if surprisingly, the mecha-derived cyberization process is ultimately more successful as a means of facilitating transcultural connection than the more “human” organic fusion of

Afrodiasporic and Asian bodies. Aubry is able to reconnect with the Ibandi and other peoples of

PanAfrica through his cybernetic enhancements in exactly the way that the Oshita twins are not able to find welcome among either Black American communities or within the Japanese nation.

The twins’ existence within AfroAsian bodies reveals a history that is marked by the scars of imperialism, jingoism, and the co-optation of Black soldiers into American forays into Asia. The technologized Black body, by contrast, represents the possibilities of the future, up to and including a future that embraces AfroAsia in a more optimistic (if nuanced) way.

In crossing the theoretical discourses of AfroAsia and Afrofuturism (in the form of Black mecha), my contention is that authors like Barnes can find alternatives to facing hegemonic

Euro-American conceptions of "modernity.” Thus, they can proleptically (re)consider having to negotiate the exigencies of that confrontation in a manner that necessitates significant marshaling of social and intellectual forces within their respective imagined communities. 47 My readings of

47 It should be noted, though, as much inherent meaning and significance as a sustained comparative reading of Black American and Japanese literatures would surely represent (especially in the parallel trends of thought that could link the Taisho/Early Showa era fictionists like Tanizaki Junichiro and Higuchi Ichio with New Negro Movement thinkers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston), such a project would perhaps be a bit overly

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a Black mecha in Firedance might be said to offer preliminary exploration of the perspectives that such a conceptual crossroads might allow subsequent scholarship to see. These intersecting strands create a pair of vanishing points that bespeak deceptively disparate starting points as part of a larger, unified panorama. Beyond the initial issue of reading Black bodies as extant within texts of an American SF canon to understand the particular structural and institutional challenges posed by liberal humanism here, the analyses below also draw upon pop cultural and literary traditions of Japan as part of conceptual continuum of nonwhite bodies in discursive engagements with modernity and "Western" modes of epistemology and genre. Whilst representing separate and quite distant modes of narrative construction and fictive exploration, my contention is that there was certainly something to be said for the ways in which authors, scholars, and philosophers of both Black American and Japanese peoples—in spite of their thoroughly unique premodern socio-historical conditions—nonetheless, found themselves facing the problems of Euro-American conceptions of "modernity" and having to negotiate the exigencies of that confrontation in a manner that necessitated significant marshaling of social and intellectual forces within their respective imagined communities.

Japanese pop culture and genre fiction provide ample space for analyzing and interrogating various and sundry sorts of futurescapes, owing, as scholars such as Susan Napier and Antonia

Levi attribute, to the direct subjugation to the atrocities of atomic warfare. As scholars indicate, culture artifacts—inclusive of print literature, yes, and also the ubiquitous soft-power commodity, anime, or Japanese animation—are rife with SF representations of various modes of visual rhetorics of catharsis, or textual signification on the event as a kind of trope of

ambitious at the present moment. Interrogating the nature of mutual and parallel grappling with the nature of identity in the face of varying forms of subtle and explicit manifestations of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is a necessary task for problematizing the nature of “modernity” as social project; yet to do so with writers of the early twentieth century is perhaps a bit beyond the pale of what this project is particularly well-suited to do.

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crisis/paradigm shifting (Napier 29). In a fascinating instance of parallelism to the approaches of diaspora and return in Afrofuturism, here too, it is possible to recognize a common approach to understanding and revisiting historical trauma through the processes of defamiliarization that SF as methodology allows as we see in Firedance (Braithwaite 88). In discussing mecha in anime,

Napier writes about an ambivalence in the genre’s concerns with both the “containment” and

“empowerment” of the body in Japanese pop cultural productions (86). She writes that “while the imagery in mecha anime is strongly technological and is often specifically focused on the machinery of the armored body, the narratives themselves often focus to a surprising extent on the human inside the machinery,” which is defined and confined by positioning its inherent vulnerability as contrast to the durability of the machine components (87). Japanese mecha then, as Napier describes it, is frequently a conservative genre in depicting reified means of controlling or bounding definitions of the human (88).

Black mecha narratives, by contrast, presents narratives distinct in their ability to efface boundaries and facilitate connections. Like their Japanese counterparts, stories like Firedance are also told to, as Napier writes, “emphasize the body instead of the armor” (90). In so doing, they resist the fracturing of subjectivity, that would see their protagonists “dehumanized” or

“alienated” by the powers of technology seen in Western/Anglo-American SF texts (90).

However, the insular and highly individualized journeys framing the experiences of characters in

Japanese mecha are defined relative to their hypermasculine, and violently technofascist means of furthering alienation (89), mecha tropes in Black American SF texts serve more complicated ends. As seen in Firedance , mechanical somatic enhancement can create greater proficiency in combat and can serve the ends of neo-colonial domination. It can also, in the same text, create a

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means of communication that serves as the foundation of the allegorical rendering of reconnection of disparate communities of the Afrodiasporic world.

Within Firedance, Aubry’s body, which has hitherto stood as a definitive statement of his autonomy, singularity, and power in the face of cyberpunk dystopia, suddenly becomes a site of semiotic engagement as it is confronted by its potential limits. Barnes frames Aubry as suddenly

“not enough” as he is, to undertake the task of entering PanAfrica. The illusions of his being a

John Henry-esque “nothing-but-a-man,” who can surpass the various manifestations of high-tech

“steam drills” that exist all around him, become complicated by the magnitude of this quest. The other novels in the trilogy suggested an anxiety about his emotional fortitude, but Firedance is the first to suggest that he might be in any way somatically unprepared for a challenge.

His particular kind of armored body has considerable aesthetic import as well; it harkens to a comparable tradition in the SF narratives of Postwar Japanese pop culture as a site of engagement that Barnes’s work seems to be discernibly keen on highlighting and signifying.

Such iconography here, I contend, speaks to the transnational, intertextual conversations that

Black mecha is capable of evincing. That said, we can also begin to assess its relevance to conversations of the AfroAsian dimensions that a Black cyborg aesthetic might take on, and the kind of revolutionary and liberating valence that such a pivot from explicitly Western modes of

SF theming might allow for.

It warrants acknowledgement an analogue to the reading of the Black technologized body as a site of historical recursion in Dolores Martinez’s reading of anime heroes as embodied social memories. Her work centers on “fighting women” in anime series like, Ghost in the Shell and

Neon Genesis Evangelion (72). Through reading the utility of the body as a site of historical recursion and the utility of Japanese mecha as allegory, Martinez is able to critically represent a

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prototype of my interpretations of Black mecha’s functionality. In these Japanese texts, the narrative posits that the female body is put directly into the service of the state (the tacit proprietor of history in these contexts) by process of its framing as cybernetic hybrid of flesh and technology (77).

Martinez’s approach, suggests a kind of matrilineal engagement with history in the foregrounding of the female Japanese body as site of technological augmentation. Such a reading is highly focused in light of preponderance of trope of the young boy who pilots the giant machine in the canonical texts of Japanese mecha, but the significant point of the genre’s work with human bodies is the clear demarcation of generational separation. Younger people— whether boys or girls—are usually the ones on the frontlines of the human/machine interstices, and theirs are the bodies marked(/scarred) by the mecha experience.

The 1995 anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion emerged as one of the most visible expressions of Japanese mecha conventions, embodying a text to put into conversation with the nascent potential of Black mecha itself. In the series, Ikari Shinji (a boy), Soryu Asuka, and

Ayanami Rei (both girls) live in a world already on the brink after a cataclysmic explosion at the

South Pole has decimated most of human civilization, and now this small group of young children must pilot massive suits of cybernetic armor to protect Japan (and the world) from further, extraterrestrial threat. Here too, it seems, “Armageddon been in effect.” This younger generation is guided by the survivors of the catastrophe in the hopes of saving what’s left of the world and rebuilding in the wake of the trauma. The obvious analogues to Japan’s postwar resurgence—life after the explosion, the visual rhetorics of reconstruction, and theme of potential resurgence—play out as symbols around the lives of these mechanized youngsters. The series goes out of its way to demonstrate the contrast between the strength of the mecha, and the

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fragility of the kids’ psyches and bodies; however, the central issue of “saving mankind” (or, in more mundane terms, the nation), outweighs their somatic integrity, and the body (male or female) has significance insofar as it can maintain the integrity of the larger community.

This study in contrast is felt in Firedance ’s Black mecha sequences as well. Again we consider the sequence of Go’s use of the power armor to free Aubry from confinement. This scene works to demonstrate how such a hypervisible hulk of the weaponized exoskeleton as somatic enhancement can function—not in the instance of frank nationalism, but instead towards the end of a larger, diasporic consciousness. Additionally, the fact that the powered armor here is operating in a symbolically liberating capacity directly augments the power dynamics already implicit in the Black body positioned as its pilot. Africa and African America are framed in immediate accord through this moment’s deployment of such a compelling manifestation of

Black mecha conventions. Moreover, in regards to the very figuration of the novel’s overt

AfroAsian aesthetic, Go’s powered armor signifies quite directly on Japanese mecha tropes, as seen in Evangelion and a host of others. The weapon’s identification in the novel as “a

Mitsubishi armor suit” in direct reference to the actual Japanese heavy industry firm, serves only to further the implicit Transpacific thematic linkage (Barnes 263). The Black male body in

Firedance is both implicitly and explicitly determined to be a site of physical power of a kind of apex somatic development; but even here, it is never read as being indestructible. Black mecha

(here as elsewhere) bespeaks a supplementary fusion of the Black male body and mechanical and prosthetic augmentation. The discussion of the (Black) cyborg body as marked by exogenous accoutrement and adornment allows for a critical engagement with the Afrofuturistic chronopolitics of historical recursion and defamiliarization. In looking at Aubry’s body as an allegorically manifest prosthesis and its vectoring of Black American identity back towards the

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continent as the story unfolds, his somatic presence as an assemblage of visible and invisible cybernetic enhancements, it becomes a site of overlapping and cyclical intersections of what it might mean to be Black, human, member of a Afrodiaspora, and a citizen of a nation-state. All of which, the text subtly reminds us, are historical processes and constructions of social epiphenomena, and are very much indebted to narratives of American alterity, and African anti- neocolonial resistance.

Black Mecha Storytelling as Narratives of Afrodiasporic Return

Paul Gilroy’s notion of the ship-in-motion as a chronotope that defines Blackness within the Transatlantic world is a highly productive way of reading a point of genesis in the creation of

Black ontologies (4). It also suggests a kind of primordial tension that emerges relative to the positioning of the Black body within a manifestation of (Euro-American) technology itself. The iconography does not end here, either, for the history of bondage in the Transatlantic world provides a rather lengthy list of sadistic technological implements—from iron masks, to specula, to the very chains themselves—that served to enforce a recognition the dynamics of domination.

Augmentation of the Black somatic here is about encumbrance and control, rather than anything remotely indicative of empowerment and agency. These implements and their foisting upon

Black bodies by those who would rob them of their cognition in an act of forceful severance of body(flesh) and mind, serve to only underscore the larger act of separation that the ship in its entirety represents: the cleaving of the African from Africa.

We understand, then, that there is some justification of the ambivalence by which Black people and Black art might view the semiotic task of fusing Black flesh and machinery. Whether wrought-iron or chromium, the legacy of a forced technophobia is something that must be negotiated in works that would propose to engage with cyberpunk tropes. At the very least,

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Sterling’s utterance regarding the movement’s positioning of technology as elementary component in “body- and mind-invasion,” takes on a rather more vexed quality when read in the context of a history of colonial and white supremacist invasion (xi).

But Japanese mecha as a speculative form, might serve here as a kind of productive intervention into the ways in which technology and technologized bodies might function in a different capacity when read in relation to nonwhite people. Though the scope and scale are different by orders of magnitude from the processes at work in Europe’s creation of the African

Diaspora, Japan as a nation was subject to an invasion of Euro-American technology and ideologies of mercantilist expansion when “opened” to the West in the mid-nineteenth century.

There are libraries of sources regarding the fallout of this instance and its long-lasting impact upon conflated notions of “Westernization” and “Modernization” in Japanese history, and things changed dramatically again with the advent of the atomic age, creating multiple historical paradigm shifts within the imagination of how technology might be used to various ends. The upshot is, however, that while a kind of technoambivalence persists in popular culture and speculative arts of Japan, the idea of the armored, technological body has taken on a remarkable salience

Firedance as a novel dovetails with the AfroAsia conceptualizations theorized in Iron

Shadows , but it is of particular interest here in its application of those Transpacific concepts for their abilities to serve as a means of imagining a globally-conscious Black future. Iron Shadows looks backward, and provides a countermemory of the history of Blackness in the Pacific world, that addresses (or at least highlights) the tensions that exist in this context. But Firedance represents a series of possibilities for a revision of such approaches into the future. The valence of these possibilities is, admittedly, ambiguous (which is perhaps in keeping with Barnes’s rather

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decidedly humanist and universalist notions of morality and identity). Nevertheless, I find a seed for conciliatory optimism herein, and a way of imagining an AfroAsian future that is considerably more empowering than the militarist/colonial past it remembers. Also, one of the most immediately noticeable aspects of the novel’s work with its AfroAsian components is the way that it frames its geopolitics. The West (qua America) exists in a state of Cold War-esque tension, not with the then-late Soviet Union, but with a bilateral power arrangement between

PanAfrica and Japan. The latter parties, though, are linked less by enthusiastic mutual support but by the fickle happenstance of economic co-dependency. For instance, Barnes writes of

Japanese technology being part of the way autocracy in PanAfrica is sustained, and PanAfrica plays the roles of resource-provider and the pugnacious bulwark against American designs towards neocolonialist jingoism.

The fictive landscapes of PanAfrica as an allegorical sign of diasporic homeland call to mind other such Afrofuturistic spaces as well. One of the most prominent and presently topical is the fictional state of Wakanda, home of the Marvel Comics superhero, T’Challa, the Black

Panther. First created in the late 1960s by comic writers Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Wakanda, in many ways anticipates the symbolic Black mecha significance of Barnes’s PanAfrica (Jones

153). Both locations are defined by the ubiquity of technologized apparatus, and exist in spite of

(and perhaps, on a metatextual level, to spite) the colonial and capitalistic predations of European and American policies of systematic underdevelopment. Yet, while PanAfrica is written to be an agential entity of futuristic imagination of unification of several extant African states, Wakanda is represented as being a product of historicized acts of resistance. The later Afrofuturist techno- utopia is almost an exercise in graphic novel dalliance in alternate history, imagining a parallel timeline wherein a distinctive Subsaharan African society was created in the distant past and

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existed in isolation into the twenty-first century. Recent comic writers, including Reginald

Hudlin and Ta-Nehisi Coates have explored the chronopolitics of such a space of countermemory.

To a certain extent, Barnes’s PanAfrica attempts to establish itself as reflective of an alternate past as well, through creating the fictional Ibandi people of eastern Africa who are a part of the ethnocultual foundation of the nation. The Ibandi are introduced in Firedance , but are explored in much greater detail in the later novels, Great Sky Woman and Shadow Valley , which situate them not merely in the historical past of the region that would one day become PanAfrica, but into the distant reaches of its prehistory. But while the Ibandi serve as a fictive anchor whereby Barnes is able to fix his imagined community of PanAfrica, the state is shown to also have rather more contemporary roots within the future history of the novel’s mid-twenty-first century. Rendering PanAfrica as amalgamated superstate, Barnes also participates in a conversation about the residual effects of colonialism and its effects of destabilizing and underdeveloping the nations in question. By crafting a narrative of their consolidation in spite of the wishes of the former colonizing powers, PanAfrica exists as a future imaginary of continental empowerment.

The devil, though, is in the details; as a writer, Barnes is never one to paint a given group/space as wholly utopian. The Black Panther comics describe a technocracy based on the empowering material resource (and proprietary stewardship of) vibranium, a fictional metal element with a host of scientific applications. Between sustainably utilizing an indigenous resource and an indigenously derived and cultivated creative genius amongst the populace, the

Black Panther’s kingdom is self-sufficient in its ability to resist nearly any imperialist designs.

As Hudlin writes, “Not only does Wakanda’s independence block the total dominance of Africa

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by colonial powers, its cultural evolution has gone unchecked for centuries. They were ahead of

[the West] a thousand years ago. And no one has colonized them, burned their books, erased their language, or broken their spirits” (148). While Firedance ’s Ibandi people have likewise,

“never been conquered,” and existed with isolated autonomy in their mountainous abode (62), the nation of PanAfrica, by contrast, is written as a functional technocracy solely through the interventions of patron states like Japan (and affiliated corporations and Yakuza zaibatsu) (65).

The Afrofuturist narrative of agency and empowerment that the region might potentially represent is undercut by the fact of its reliance upon neocolonial factions to prop up a regime that is (when the reader is first introduced to it at least) less utopian than it is exploitative and autocratic.

These would-be sites of homeland and return are both vexed in their signification as such for several reasons, and it is these that I would proffer as the rationale for reading them as ideal loci for the application of the Black mecha motif of prosthetic reconnection. While neither

Wakanda nor PanAfrica are shown to be especially inviting to outsiders—even other folk of the

African Diaspora—connection and reconnection are shown as being possible in their respective manifestations of Black Atlantic routes; such instances simply are in need of various signifiers of cybernetic healing of the traumas of initial diasporic severance. Furthermore, Japanese tech sustains PanAfrican strength. On the surface, of course, this seems to be well and truly in keeping with the techno-Orientalist framing of Japan as inscrutable high-tech wonderland that so suffused works of the cyberpunk movement. Such a concept exists in a kind of tension within

Japan as well, as the notion of robotto oukoku (ロボット王国 ) or “Robot Kingdom” is one that scholars like Frederik L. Schodt have identified in the late 1980s as a kind of self-referential, self-Orientalizing expression by the Japanese themselves (27). The ubiquity of Tokyo’s neon and

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polished surfaces became the latest signifier for an essentialized marker of unbridgeable alterity, as grey and vague as Gibson’s renderings of the Chiba City sky. While Barnes’s novel revels in its depictions of a high-tech Africa too, the intermediary force of Japanese mercantilism becomes an ambiguity that exists between cooperation and exploitation.

“Papa was a Rollin’ Stone”: Black Mecha as means of reading Fatherhood and Familial Connection as History in Firedance and Black Panther

This cross-cultural engagement between Barnes’s brand of Black speculative fiction and the Japanese future imaginary that undergirds much of that nation’s pop cultural and literary production should be read as a natural course, given the utility of my proffered concept of Black mecha. The term “mecha” itself is one derived from Japanese SF subgenre approaches, and linking it with a Afrofuturist Blackness semiotically highlights the very nature of the fusion approach that I explore. The significance of Black mecha’s symbolic imaginary of fusion lies in the fact that, even in Japan, mecha itself is read and understood as meaning more than just robots and cyborgs. As Napier articulates, mecha as set of conventions highlights precisely the kinds of anxiety that exist within the effacement of boundaries between biological and mechanical bodies.

Indeed, it is—in her words—more about the body than the armor (90).

But while that body can quite directly be seen as reflecting both the maternal —Napier reads the Evangelion robots as evoking the image of a giant iron womb (99)—and the self as autonomous subject therein, I would posit that the kinds of connections inferred in Black mecha allegories as understood by Barnes and the Black Panther film are primarily patrilineal. The mecha components of the cyberization process link Aubry and T’Challa directly to their fathers insofar as the prostheses allow them, for better and worse, to reconnect with them. The

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artificiality of those connections, however, is a sign of the kind of ambivalence that these fatherly bonds represent.

In Black Panther , T’Challa is grieving the death of his father, King T’Chaka, whom he idolized as King and champion of the Wakandan people, as the previous hero to don the technologized suit that came with the title of Black Panther. But as T’Challa fights against

Killmonger for the throne, he learns his father’s hidden secret: that, as part of a mission to protect the secrecy of the Wakandan techno-utopia from the outside world (inclusive, importantly of the larger Afrodiaspora), the man T’Challa idolized and held above reproach commits fratricide, killing his younger brother, who happens to have been Killmonger’s father.

The mantle of the Black Panther is becomes inextricable from the proverbial “Sins of the

Father.”

The connections implied in the Aubry Knight novels function in a similar capacity.

Firedance ’s allegory of diasporic return is one that I see reflecting a generalized historicizing project, whereby the technological prostheses allow him to re-engage his relationship to the continent. The technology “invades” his hermetically sealed Black (African) somatic with aspects of Euro-American technological accoutrements, but these allow for precisely the sort of interaction and intelligibility with the Ibandi and other PanAfrican peoples (including the

Japanese). In addition to this Black mecha allegorical troping for the sake of telling a story of prosthetic community on a macro level, the novel suggests that it might be possible to read the connections much more specifically: Barnes frames Aubry, Swarna, and Leslie within a genealogy of patrilineal connections back to the continent itself that are uniformly enacted by their cybernetic augmentations. Moreover, it works as a meaningful complication within the

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iconography of Pan-African (and PanAfrican) “family” and notions of ethnocentric cultural nationalisms.

The implications of the patrilineal the line of descent from Swarna to Aubry to Leslie can also be read in light of their progressive stages of posthuman Blackness and cyborg fusions.

Swarna is the apotheosis of toxic masculinity, long on dominating power, but effectively fragile when directly confronted. Aubry, while still far less than heroic and reliant upon prostheses to facilitate genuine connections with his diasporic community, is an effective vehicle for framing cyberpunk Blackness through his arrogation of the corrupted patriarch of PanAfrica itself. Leslie, the next generation, signifies the obviation of all boundaries, representing the ability to freely connect and fit in wherever they go precisely because of their cyborg status. Of course, this genealogical configuration is not necessarily to imply that their needs must be an implication of linear teleology undermining the novels’ play with temporality. Both Swarna (past) and Leslie

(future) are cyborg figures in a way that—at the beginning of Firedance—Aubry is not. And

Firedance likewise suggests that it is not simply a matter of cyberization that signifies the upending of arbitrary binaries: while Leslie is all things simultaneously, Swarna clings to an essentialized notion of patriarchal authority by utilizing his bioengineered organs to sustain himself (and only himself).

Thus, the iconography of the Black cyborg here must be unpacked a bit more. What strikes me about Aubry and Leslie as differentiating them from Swarna is that they represent, in

Barnes’s fiction, successful modes of fusing mind and body, in a way that the PanAfrican dictator categorically does not. The latter is perhaps more akin to the traditional cyberpunk hero, allowing his body to go to waste and ruling through a projected and propagated facade of psychological power. He is precisely the kind of Cartesian duality that his progeny stand in

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diametrical opposition towards. Aubry almost overcorrects in the opposite direction. It is only through recognizing the limitations of his physical powers that he is able to understand and realize that the nature of his hate and rage towards those who framed him and led to his capture.

This first step towards an ameliorated state of reconciled mind-body (and spirit) allows Aubry to address the psychosomatic wounds and begin to fashion prosthetic means of healing. While

Firedance ultimately conveys this through the Black mecha allegories of community reconnection, Streetlethal and Gorgon Child represent this process of convalescence at the micro level, through his establishment of individual, personal relationships.

After the wounds inflicted by Maxine’s betrayal, the Ortega cartel, and even the initial departure from PanAfrica itself, the motif of severance and subsequent isolation serve to define

Aubry’s early life. Cut off from the work and community that gave his life meaning, he is nonetheless able to overcome these acts of historical violence and form relationships that sustain him all the same. We initially see this through the acceptance and embrace of the Scavengers, a cadre of urban resistance fighters who literally hack out an existence beneath the ruins of downtown LA, and the slow beginnings of his relationship with Promise. Through the staging of a connection with The Scavengers, too, the novel suggests that there may be a palliative at work here that is deeper than just the salve of belonging , though this is certainly a vital element of

Aubry’s healing process. Being both in the streets and of them, during his days as an enforcer,

Aubry, Barnes’s fiction seems to suggest, is a figure without a single home space (save, perhaps, wherever he lays his proverbial hat). The time spent among the Scavengers, though, is a refuge for his body to heal in the wake of a first attack on the cartel, and a space for him to feel safe and to belong . The novel even suggests that his interactions with Scavenger patriarch, Kevin

Warrick, is an erstwhile form of fathering, of a kind he had hitherto not been afforded.

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It is worth noting, however, that the kind of relationship between Aubry and Warrick is one that crosses the racial divide. Kevin’s whiteness, though unremarked-upon beyond the preliminary statement of it as fact, does contrast with Aubry’s Blackness, if only in terms of somatic or phenotypical dimensions. Nonetheless, the older man provides his protégé with aid, succor, and home which is all considerably more than any of the other surrogate fathers that

Aubry finds throughout his life. The questions of fatherhood, and the quest to address what exactly “being a father” means, are arguably among the central motifs of the trilogy as a whole.

Streetlethal presents Aubry himself as a deracinated individual wrestling with the various patriarchal hierarchies he encounters to attempt to find a space wherein he might fit. The Ortega clan fails him in this respect, as he is an abject outsider to their family/business, and then actively seeks to subvert, undermine, and overthrow it. Kevin, as mentor and “coach” is a helpful figure in Aubry’s life, and although he dies and leaves the fighter alone again, he bequeaths to him the entirety of the Scavenger’s operation.

But in Gorgon Child and Firedance, however, fatherhood as a kind of embodied and socially coded kind of masculinity takes on a different set of dimensions. Hitherto in the series,

Barnes presented Aubry as solely a product of “the streets” in LA. Implicitly understood to be

African American, through the occasional references to the phenotypic markers of such an identity (e.g. “Aubry Knight’s body was a statue carved in obsidian”), his background was largely unimportant, save the fact that he had long been a “goon” for the Ortega crime syndicate

(Barnes 1983: 15-16). Firedance, through retroactive continuity manipulation, gives the reader considerably more background on the man and his origins, and these latter help us to see him as a truer manifestation of a narrative of diaspora and return.

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Aubry was actually spirited out of PanAfrica before his body could be reduced to “spare parts” for Swarna, and grew up briefly under the tutelage of a member of the warrior caste of the same people as Swarna—the fictional Ibandi—in America. His mentor and erstwhile “father,”

Thomas Jai, cares for him, but meets an untimely demise in an alleyway. While dreaming, during a medical examination prior to the cyberization process, Aubry recalls the scene and its impact:

The boy lay, curled on his side, matted with filth. Crying. Little Black boy, his little Black hands stretched out into the dark, afraid, hearing doors open where there were no doors. Heard the wind blowing, an evil wind, where there was no sound. Wrapped thin arms around his hungry stomach, and cried out for a father who could no longer answer…(ellipsis, original) There is no one there, little boy. Trust no one but yourself. (149)

The sequence ends with Aubry telling himself (across space and time and consciousness), “It is time to be your own father, Aubry. Your own mother. Only then will that boy stop crying” (149).

At the time of its occurrence, his father’s death is the moment of rupture forcing Aubry to turn to a life of crime and violence himself. The becomes apparent even to scientists monitoring his condition during the flashback, as one flatly and clinically remarks, “His father’s death created massive trauma, and he built his physical walls around it,” (150) . Aubry himself, though, remains never the wiser about his true origins until the mission to kill Swarna has him reacquainted with the Ibandi and his cloned “siblings.” The latter group, while initially hostile towards Aubry, and ready to annihilate him as a threat, come to recognize him as family, and gain a respect for his physical power which ultimately encourages them to let him into their fold, welcoming him as “brother” (342). They are the ones who explain his larger role in the family/clone drama of PanAfrican royal politics.

The Ibandi connection, however, is a much more involved process of reconnection and requires Barnes to make the most use of the prosthetic community he has been writing for

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Aubry. Though initially recognized as being among “his people,” the process of real connection is considerably more involved (284). Because the hero had been taken from the continent before he was able to undergo the rites of passage into adulthood. This takes the form of two processes, both of which are highly focused on the somatic action and abilities of the body to perform as a site of physical strength, and as a means of communication 48 . After participating in the titular firedance, Aubry is made a part of a ritual hunt. Not the killing of a lion, as would have been the case in the past, but with due deference to the gene-splicing, matter-manipulating technology of the current PanAfrica, the killing of a bioengineered tyrannosaurus with aught but his body and a spear (314).

Aubry, who recognizes that he is “a child, glad to be home,” among the Ibandi, is made aware of his true lineage, and thus can move forward having begun to finally resolve his feelings of deracination, and larger conflicts of identity (299, 344). As Grayson writes of the novel’s approach to this theme:

Before [Aubry] can move forward he must first travel back. The path that takes him back to Africa and to the ancient beliefs is represented by the Ibandi (an invented people) and the Ibandi proverbs. Although the Ibandi are not a real African people, they symbolize a return to origin; for Knight, that means unveiling and recognizing his true self (100).

This elevation of the traditional Ibandi heritage as marker of embodied identity is certainly a way of combating the totalizing presence of the Armageddon Effect within the narrative. It also, however, speaks precisely to van Veen’s point about the dearth of a homeland to return to: the very constructedness of the Ibandi people and culture 49 itself presents the novel’s need to

48 Barnes imagines the Ibandi as a people intensely concerned with bodily movement as a means of communicating. Great Sky Woman , which furthers the story of the Ibandi through their prehistory, frequently has instances wherein the people “dance,” rather than “tell” stories. Dancing a story is especially useful when the act of “telling” it is too inexact. 49 A concern that Barnes actually revisits in his 2006 novel, Great Sky Woman, which presents a narrative of life amongst the Ibandi themselves, thirty thousand years ago. The novel and its sequel Shadow Valley (2009) do much to flesh out the lore and lifeways of this fictional civilization.

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establish an artificial connection that straddles the border between their (fictive) traditions and

“authentic” mode of expressing Black identity and that of the futuristic technocracy of

PanAfrica. Aubry has been made to realize that his home is in PanAfrica, and has undergone an initiation into the ways of his ancestors (clone-status aside, he is embraced as a part of the

Ibandi), but this homecoming is further complicated by the fact that he must still kill his biological “father.” The status of his identity as part of the community of his people, necessitates the destruction of the man whose genes served to give him life in the first place.

Through that return, though, Aubry, scarred and marked by his encounters with white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in its many forms, quite obviously cannot completely return to a mythic moment of origin. In spite of any attempts to reconcile with the personal traumas of his severance from (Pan)Africa, his Blackness is a product of his apocalyptic alien nation. Swarna’s domain is not a home for him, inasmuch as his departure has left him quite literally without a home. This, for a man who has spent the better part of the two preceding novels coming to terms with what family means (though primarily as constructed in terms of the “nuclear family” with his role as patriarch), creates a potential for vexation. But whereas Aubry’s sense of family is reaffirmed by the texts’ privileging of affection, connectivity, and mutual willingness to sacrifice, the figuration of Swarna as an almost Freudian failed father stands in stark contrast.

The novel makes no quibble about whether or not his craven utility of the organs of his genetic offspring is wrong. It finds him literally cowering on his throne as a surrogate fights Aubry on his behalf, and their brief but fatal reunion is a thoroughgoing anti-climax.

Swarna, who until the last hundred pages of the novel, had taken on a stature not unlike that of the final boss of a video game, a mastermind of dizzying intellect who has remained perched upon the throne of a nation that rivals the US as economic, technocratic, and geopolitical

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power. A figure who has mastered the stuff of life itself, to make his own genetic descendants into “raw material” to sustain himself through decades, and who has mustered the technological means to resurrect actual dinosaurs to inhabit the menagerie of his whimsy. Barnes has written the Aubry’s Freudian paternal nemesis as the apotheosis of Black masculine authority. But the moment of revelation, however, recalls less the supermasculine Black somatic sublime than Oz, the putatively “great and powerful”: Swarna is a decrepit coward. The mastermind of

PanAfrica’s ascent is not a body-devouring potentate; he is a frail old man who cringes on the throne behind the facade of domination, using the bodies of his offspring to stave off the realities of his own mortal terror. When Aubry confronts him directly, “the thing that had been Phillipe

Swarna screamed as Aubry came near him. And the scream went beyond words, beyond fear, to some place where logic and rationality ceased to work. Where perhaps it had never existed at all”

(369).

This confrontation between Swarna and Aubry, however, is where we might begin to systematically assess the novel as a whole as a manifestation of a Black cyborg. Barnes explicitly delineates the connection between the two men in terms of the dictator’s technologized body:

“there was no doubt that when [Swarna] had been young, when he had been in his prime, when he had walked with full utility, when his eyes and heart had been his own, before he had required marrow transplants to keep himself alive, he had been Aubry Knight” (362). But it is more than just the somatic that separates them. Aubry’s experiences with forced emigration/exile across the

Atlantic bespeaks a moment of traumatic rupture, an apocalyptic severance of ties to an historicised familial site of origin in Africa. The chronopolitics of Aubry’s connection to his

African forebears, then, is a vexed loop. Genetically, he is both descendant of Swarna and

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Swarna himself, a point underscored by the moment of recognition that dawns upon the latter before he meets his fate:

Aubry took Swarna’s face in his hands and gazed into his eyes. For the fraction of an instant logic returned, and a kind of animal recognition dawned in Swarna’s ruined brain. “You…are me,” Swarna said. And Aubry looked at the bones beneath the skin and the eyes, and the flesh hanging on the body, and something within him said yes . But he whispered, “ No. I’ve never been you.” He twisted, once. Hard. (369)

Through returning to the site of the initial injury and the recognition of it as an event horizon of beginning (Aubry’s birth), ending (Swarna’s death), and beginning-again (Aubry’s ascent to the throne of PanAfrica) the novel challenges a facile notion of an arrow-of-time progression, through the suggestion of a temporally cyclical alternative. One that also unseats a reading of

Blackness as solely (over)determined by the events of the past, and allows for a vision of the future that revisits, reconnects, and remembers it, without being solely defined by it. The sum total of all his actions leading to the return and confrontation with Swarna, we might contend, serve as progressive prostheses to help ameliorate that wound of displacement.

The novel’s work with the notion of return as strictly palliative act of reconnection and reestablishment of a cohesive whole for Black identities gives additional heft to its impact as a text of prosthetic community. The figurative prosthesis of the act of returning to Africa can represent in the narrative is not a revolutionary instance solely by virtue of Aubry being on the continent. We might meaningfully ask if, in much the same way as Haraway’s assertion that the cyborg would not recognize the origin space of the Garden of Eden (Haraway 316), if a figure such as Aubry Knight, prior to the onset of narrative action in Firedance , can nonetheless immediately be healed of the diasporic rupture through the simple act of return. All the more so,

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considering the vexation of that moment of Genesis with the already-past-tense Revelations of the Armageddon Effect (van Veen 69).

This allegorical rendering of forced departure and return allows for a discussion about the chronopolitics of Afrodiaspora itself. Barnes novel directly works through its mecha troping of cyborg/composite beings born of African patriarchal authority to stage a countermemory of the initial narrative of forced (and apocalyptic) departure and dispersal. Barnes’s character of Aubry finds his life in an American futurescape defined by natural, national, and economic disasters, having been forcibly taken from PanAfrica in his youth (albeit for the purposes of saving him from Swarna’s depredations). For him, as van Veen writes (channeling the hip hop group, Public

Enemy), “Armageddon been in effect”; his apocalyptic moment of personal rupture with the continent defines everything about his life as he moves forward, up to and including his cyclical return to the site of the initial abduction.

Perhaps the effort that Barnes has him expend to forcibly and actively reconnect to the cultural foundations of the functionally “alien” Ibandi people are also indicative of a much more complex narrative of bridging the rupture of diasporic spacetime foundational to, as van Veen describes, “strategically mobilize estrangement towards becoming” in the face of the

Armageddon Effect (van Veen 73). The symbolic act of his return works as a means of addressing the historical weight of his Blackness a product of a teleological historical construction of Black identities through time only insofar as he is able to participate in an active and substantive investigation of what that identity means.

There is no celebration upon Aubry’s return to the continent, which receives him with neither open arms, nor immediate recognition. Yet as he endures his travels through PanAfrica, and as he creates a bond (albeit temporary) with his fellow clones and, (more lastingly) with the

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Ibandi, the process of prosthetically creating an assembled community to facilitate the act of reconnection, becomes readily apparent.

Conclusions

My examination of Black Panther and Firedance here is one that I envisioned as a kind of coda for the project in toto . It necessitated a revisitation of the themes of embodiment, intersectional identity formation, history/countermemory, and allegories of cybernetic fusion. At the same time, though (very much in keeping with the dissertation’s larger motif of sankofa), I envisioned this chapter as likewise suggesting an as-yet-untapped potentiality for exploring new trajectories in Afrofuturism that pull from a much more broadly conceived definition of

Afrodiasporic spaces. Japanese science- and speculative fictions have (perhaps due in no small part to their dynamic dialogues with Western cyberpunk aesthetics) come to take on a global dimension in their ability to find audience across a welter of cultures and languages. In reading this as an expression of nonwhite traditions and (post-)modernity, I hold that there is a lot to be gained from exploring the ways that AfroAsian methodologies of reciprocal engagements with future imaginations can inform one another. In looking at Steven Barnes’s fiction as an advance guard of this kind of connection, I want to leave space open for further theorizing on what larger concerns and notions (in addition to, for example, Black mecha), might possibly come about in subsequent works of Black speculative fiction.

Black mecha’s position at the nexus point of Afrofuturist AfroAsia leaves it open for imagining transnational, transcultural narratives and memories. It engages with the processes of

(re)connection to the past, whether in a fictionalized genealogical sense, or in an allegorically revelatory/“un-silencing” sense. At the same time, it posits the trope of the Black body as one that is not solely marked by the apocalyptic scars of the past, but one that can also be read

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through the palliative and convalescent application of future imaginary. Although the future- tech itself might potentially be stamped by the legacies ambivalent or oppressive systems, the inherent resilience of the Black body serves as a means to take the tools of the past and use them to push back against their original purpose to potentially serve the ends of a rather more immediately subversive and empowering end.

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APPENDIX

ABRIDGED INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

My conversation with Steven Barnes from February 3, 2018:

[There were several minutes of off-the-record conversation prior to the beginning of the recording. The transcript picks up where Barnes begins to record the Skype interview session.]

Steven Barnes: Give me just a second. Okay, so it’s recording now, and it’s a video recording,

so it's all yours. I'm going to give you access to it, so you don't have to worry about

taking those notes if you don't want to. So we can just have a conversation.

Alex Brickler: That’s fantastic, because you were talking very fast and I was trying not to miss

all those pearls of wisdom or whatever, and I want to make sure that I can do them all

justice.

SB: You got it. So ask away. This is your time. This is time I’ve put aside for you, and we’ve

got 45 minutes, so ask away.

AB: OK, great. So since we been having a conversation about Aubry Knight, I want to jump

back to that 1980s moment in time and those books were being published. In as much as

that allows us to talk a little bit about how and where [Aubry] fits in relation to

movement cyberpunk, I was very intrigued by the novels themselves and—since I’ve

been reading a lot of Gibson and I've been reading a lot of other writers from that

particular moment in time, the Mirrorshades collection and whatnot—and one of the

things that I find to be so intriguing about the Aubry Knight books is that they're doing

(to me as a reader) they're doing similar sorts of things to when I see in cyberpunk

fiction. But they're doing it in a in a in a markedly different kind of way. Insofar as much

of what we see in cyberpunk is this creation and reification of that notion of dualism that

you were exactly speaking against: the separation of mind and body. Like, when we look

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at Neuromancer or something like that, the whole premise is that the protagonist is able

to separate his consciousness from his body, his body becomes a prison of the flesh.

Whereas, by contrast, what I'm seeing in Streetlethal, Gorgon Child, and Firedance, I'm

seeing the aesthetics of that and a lot of the accoutrements of that, but I'm seeing it done

in the services of a markedly different end. And so I was very curious about where you

saw them in relation to that, and what that might mean?

SB: You know, I was reading sci-fi voluminously at the time, and just everything I could get my

hands on. But those books are just trying to tell a good story, and they were filtering my

own concerns. Like I said, I was I was concerned with the integration of my own

personality and as such when I wrote about Aubrey, who is this ultimate badass. Those

books are what I would call 2 1/2 dimensional: they didn’t quite exist in our universe, the

science doesn't quite work that way. There's always a lot about Aubry that is really “a

little more” than real human beings are. I’ve known real human beings are just about as

dangerous as Aubry…but they don’t move like Aubry.

So Aubry was like halfway between a serious novel and a comic book; it was a

hero who could do wish fulfillment. And then he was placed into a situation where there

were world-affecting consequences that could be modified or influenced with physical

action. So it's like, I would try to find the sweet spot: where is a plot or a controversy or

conspiracy where instead of unraveling it in the Supreme Court or in the Washington

Post, somebody could deal with it with a kick to the balls. So I would manipulate a

situation into a crux-point that can be resolved physically, so that I can do the action

sequences that I love doing and am really good at.

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But I also was always asking, "who am I” and “what is true about the world”? So

I couldn't get away from that. I couldn't get away from the philosophical questions, even though on one level my only intent was to write an adventure novel. Even then, I was starting to ask questions.

For instance, having been raised by my mother and my sister and without my father in the home, I had real questions about what it was to be a man. Having been raised being this light-skinned—I mean, obviously, I'm not a Zulu, and my mother was very light skinned—there was a lot of conflict about race in the house. She was she was caught, I think. She was part of the generation of mulatto basically caught between being white and black and not knowing their identity, and so I didn’t have that.

My wife, Tananarive [Due] for instance, she was raised by family that the educated her about what it meant to be Black. That there was power there, and that there was heritage there, that there was strength there. Her parents gave a rock to stand out there. I, in a lot of ways, I avoided that question for a very long time. Because there was no strength for me there, and if I went into that I was going to be angry, and if I was angry I would express that my relationships and I would not be able to create the kind of relationships that would enable me to learn the things I need to learn to survive. You can’t look at somebody on one level and say “I hate your ass…will you help me please?”

I couldn’t do that, so I avoid it for a very long time.

And then, by the time I started coming back around to it and playing with it…You know, Streetlethal , that universe doesn’t really deal so much with the race question in

America. It poses an African identity for Aubry, but Aubry doesn’t really have conflicts in the United States based upon race. I avoided that shit.

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AB: I picked up on that.

SB: Yeah, I avoided that. I didn’t start dealing with that until books like Blood Brothers.

AB: Right, right, right.

SB: And that was very much in response to a specific conversation I had with a friend of mine

(He’s a computer engineer, brilliant man). And I had written at a bunch of books, bunch

of writing, I had published over a million words I’m sure, and I was at his place one

night. I was hanging around over at his house for a party and some of the people of left

and I looked around the room and I realize this is the first time in my adult life I've been a

room with nothing but Black men.

And I said to myself, “I am so broken. I am so lost.” I have been traveling through

foreign territory and I don't know who I am.

Or rather, I don’t know who I am in this sense. There are other senses in which I

know very much who I am. I was forced to go into meditative disciplines, and

therapeutic disciplines, and shamanic disciplines, and martial discipline that all asked that

question: “Who are you?” So I made contact with that knowledge. But as for who I am

specifically, or who I was specifically as a black man, I did not know. And I remember

saying to my friend once, I said, “I am afraid of something here. I fear that if I express

my blackness in my writing, my career will suffer. But if I don't express my Blackness in

my writing, I will be being dishonest to the little boy was who started this journey.”

The little boy who read Conan the Barbarian , and James Bond, and Tarzan of the

Apes , and realized that there were no Black people here. And when there were, they were

denigrated. They die protecting [the white people]. The central thesis of Tarzan is stated

very clearly in Jungle Tales of Tarzan , a story called “Tarzan and his Son,” I think it was.

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And Edgar Rice Borroughs said it straight out: “white men have an imagination, Black

men have little, and animals have none.” It couldn’t be any clearer what he was saying.

That the central thesis of Tarzan is that an Englishman, a white man, raised by apes, is

more human than a black man.

All the same, I needed those images of masculinity. As I said once upon a time: I sacrificed my

melanin on the altar of my testosterone. I needed to be a man more than I needed to be

black.

AB: That’s powerful.

SB: But once I had that, then I was free to start asking myself questions. Questions like, what

have I done? What is been done to me? How do I heal?

So my friend said to me said to me—and this was one of the best and smartest

things anybody ever said to me. He said, “Steve somebody's going to have to start

writing the stories that include us in the future. If not you, who? If not now, when? And

why would you want to write stories for the pleasure of people you wouldn’t even want

to have in your home?”

And I said “Damn.” It’s the truth. If I don't speak up, if I don't find my voice—

my true voice—I am dishonoring my father's memory. I am dishonoring the men who

struggled and I prayed for the day that someone like me would have the strength and the

clarity to wake up and say, back the fuck off. Even if they take me down, I have created

space for people like you, and I have created space for people like my son.

And the truth is that there are many, many allies out there. The average white

person is just a person who wants to live their life, wants to raise a family, and who is

worried about Viagra, and a bad back, and whether or not his wife is cheating on him,

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and his mortgage…They aren’t thinking about Black people. If they’ve got a Black

neighbor, then what they’re worried about is is their lawn neat? You know, is it gonna

drag down the value of my property?

I may not want you to marry my daughter, but if your kid is out there wandering

out into the street, will I grab that kid and pull him back so that he doesn’t get hit by a

car? Probably!

Most people are good and decent human beings. Race gets layered over that stuff

because of our very unfortunate history in America. Not because of something

intrinsically wrong with white people. Lion’s Blood was taking six years of my life to

create a master thesis to address what it was that I really thought about that. And I put it

out there.

[Laughs] Now I’ve forgotten what your original question was!

AB: [Laughs] Not at all! Listen, by traveling that far, we already covered a lot of ground and

addressed a lot of what was so pertinent to my central questions about your work.

SB: Good!

AB: I was curious, I must say, because one of the things that I did notice that there is a big jump

in terms of—I won’t necessarily go so far as to say your ideological engagement with

race—but it does seem as though there is a much more pronounced engagement with a

race in Firedance . And that's one of the reasons why about I found that particular novel

to be a little bit more compelling.

SB: More culture and identity than race. Because race as the construct that exists in America is

about Black versus white.

AB: Right.

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SB: Aubry’s search is “who am I,” right? Not “who are you, and who am I,” or “who are we

together,” in terms of a white person. Just, who is he. And his reconnection with his

African roots was not about his conflict with white people. See, the time that you spent

fighting the other person is time that you're not spending tunneling into yourself. And

that's one of the things that trolls on the Internet do: don't ask questions, fight me. They

literally win if they can get you to fight. [Barnes speaks for about a minute relative to the

nature of contentious internet discourse, and the presence of trolls, snakes, and monsters

in digital spaces]. But human beings aren’t [monsters]. There’s no the larger percentage

of monsters among whites or Asians than there are among Black people. We just didn't

have the power to make our monstrosity hurt as much.

There's a difference [to me] of racism and institutional racism. Black academics

now call racism what I call “institutional racism,” and I find that to be a corruption of

language. But that’s me. I’m a dinosaur, what can I say. I'm perfectly happy with the

definitions that my parents used or what I see in the dictionary. That racism is the

attribution differential worth a capacity based on race or ethnicity. That definition works

perfectly for me.

And then if you have social power behind that, now you have a nightmare. But

it’s not that white people are more racist. It’s just that they have the power to make that

racism stick . Next question!

AB: Cheers! So, I've actually got a few questions about race in Lion’s Blood , but we can table

those for a moment. Because, as we are talking about ethnicity and defining racialized

identity on a global scale, I’m very curious about the Ibandi, the fictitious African people

that you created.

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SB: Yes!

AB: And I’m curious about—

SB: Yes, they should’ve been Wakandan, don’t you think?

AB: That was literally my next question! Was there any real influence of Wakanda on the

Ibandi? Or was this just sort of, something that was a kind of parallel development?

SB: Well, I would say probably, but not consciously. I mean, I certainly read the first Black

Panther comics in 1966. But I actually wrote about the Ibandi for the first time in a short

story in Larry Niven’s The Magic May Return anthology. And there, they were just a

magical people, who harvested the magic of their children in order to do wonderful

things.

Later on, I wrote Streetlethal in which Aubry is this badass street fighter who

learns to open his heart. With Cyloxibin and Promise Cotonou.

You know I actually created Promise before. Promise first appeared in the story

called, “Is Your Glass Half Empty,” (one of the first stories I ever sold). It was about a

compulsive gambler, who hawks his pacemaker, and Promises was turning tricks in Las

Vegas. I wrote a couple stories about her, and then I wrote Streetlethal and co-opted her

into that story. And then I healed both of these people [Promise and Aubry].

In a lot of ways the professional leg breaker, the streetfighter, and the professional

thug, and the prostitute are similar in a lot of ways. The woman is selling or softness, and

the man is selling strength. And that softness and that strength are supposed to be

complementary to produce the next generation and protect them, but instead of that I

monetize it, and corrupt it.

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So I didn’t talk about that explicitly in those books, but it wasn’t until Gorgon

Child , that I even started asking myself questions about where Aubry came from, and

what he might be connected to. And it wasn’t until Firedance that all of that all of that

became connected in my mind.

AB: Yeah. I picked up on that. It did feel a little, “ret-con-y” [read: retroactive continuity

adjustment]. But it all fit well.

SB: Well, he didn’t know who he was, so I felt like I could get away with that. Whether or not I

did that perfectly, I don't know, because I never re-read my own books.

AB: You never do?

SB: It’s it's it's just a quirk of mine. Tananarive re-reads her books, all the time. But If I need to

write a sequel, I’ll just write it, and then I’ll go back and scan over to see if I find the

information that I need. Yeah, but for some odd reason, I just don't go back. It's always

forward. I'm not saying that's a good thing. It's just, honestly a thing.

AB: So, I do have one last question for you. I know you all [Barnes and Tananarive Due] do the

talk, the webinar, on Afrofuturism, and unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to

participate in that, but since I’m in a position to get it straight from the horse’s mouth,

right here, succinctly: what does Afrofuturism mean to you?

SB: Myths create a context for human existence. Science fiction is specifically a Western

innivation in many ways. It asks questions about who we are, using the specific lens of

the scientific method. It does so in terms of, “what if,” “if only,’ and “if this goes on.”

Afrofuturism is the science fiction, the fantasy, and the horror, that relates

specifically to the children of the African Diaspora. It is our mythologies. It is placing

ourselves back in the picture. Because any group of people, will create a mythology that

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places themselves central. The mythology of any group of human beings in the world is

basically, “God made us first and loves us best.” That’s what everybody does. The

children of the African diaspora are arguably the only people on the planet who have a

mythology that places our oppressors closer to God than ourselves. It is insanely

destructive.

So Afrofuturism is dangerous as hell.

AB: Thanks so much for taking the time to have conversation with me this afternoon, Steve. I

really, really appreciate it. I’m walking away with a whole lot of gems here

SB: No problem! I’ll email you a link to the recording, and you’ll be able to play it all you want

to, okay?

AB: Fantastic!

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV’s his scholarship focuses broadly on African American literature, but more specifically on Black Science and Speculative Fictions. He has completed a

Masters of Applied Social Sciences degree in History from Florida A&M University, and an MA degree in Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities, with a thesis focusing on representations of Black masculinities in postwar Japanese literature. His scholarship frequently presents a methodological nexus of Afrofuturism and AfroAsia in order to imagine liberationist futures for people of colour in a global capacity.

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