ON BECOMING: AFROFUTURISM, WORLDBUILDING, and EMBODIED IMAGINATION by Clayton D. Colmon Jr. a Dissertation Submitted to the F

ON BECOMING:

AFROFUTURISM, WORLDBUILDING, AND EMBODIED IMAGINATION

Clayton D. Colmon Jr.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Spring 2020

ON BECOMING:

AFROFUTURISM, WORLDBUILDING, AND EMBODIED IMAGINATION

Clayton D. Colmon Jr.

Approved: ______John R. Ernest, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of English Literature

Approved: ______John Pelesko, Ph.D Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences

Approved: ______Douglas J. Doren, Ph.D. Interim Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and Dean of the Graduate College

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______M. Jean Pfaelzer, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______A.Timothy Spaulding, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______Hoda Zaki, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Good. Better. Best. Never let them rest—until good becomes better, and better becomes best.” These words resonate with me still. Thanks mom and dad.

I wish to honor the patient village of family and friends whose hopeful support has sustained me through this work. To my sisters and brother—Quay, Shay, and

Ryan—for being fellow blerds who encouraged imaginative adventures and held me accountable to the realities of life outside of the academy. I’m grateful for your restorative presence and love, through it all. To Andrea for finding me in a previous life and sticking by me through this one; you are the best of friends.

Heartfelt appreciation to my dissertation committee and to the University of

Delaware English Department. I thank Jeannie Pfaelzer for her tenacity of spirit and utopic vision; for supporting a queer Black graduate student through difficult drafts; and for encouraging excellence. To P. Gabrielle Foreman for honoring and excavating our ancestors’ labor. Your mentorship has moved mountains and continues to build worlds for me and countless others. Many thanks to A. Timothy Spaulding, for believing in vampires and for helping me unpack the reformative potential in speculative texts. To Hoda Zaki whose work informs how I understand Octavia

Butler’s legacy and feminist utopias.

I would also like to recognize the many, many folx whose labor is too often buried in academic spaces. To the Black women who protected me within a sociopolitical system that continues to destroy Black lives and disrupt Black futures;

iv to teachers like Mrs. Davis who encouraged shy Black kids to read, write, and speak their dreams; to the anonymous folx who nurtured nascent online communities and modeled generative relationships through technology—from Blackplanet to Twitter; to the wise DJs who created space for spiritual release on crowded dancefloors; and to my students whose brilliance and courage pushed me to radicalize my pedagogy.

Thank you all.

Lastly, I’d like to offer a special acknowledgement to my partner, Jarrett, for being a treasured confidant and comrade in the struggle to realize a better world.

J'apprends à travers nous.

Blessed are the coffeemakers, for they will be called fuelers of dreams.

vi TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... ix ABSTRACT ...... x

Chapter

1 INTRODUCTION: AFROFUTURISM, UTOPIA, AND IMAGINATION ...... 1

Conceptual Genealogy and Framework ...... 1 Organizational Framework and Critical Engagement ...... 11

2 QUEER AFROFUTURISM: UTOPIA, SEXUALITY, AND DESIRE IN SAMUEL DELANY’S “AYE, AND GOMORRAH” ...... 16

Introducing Queer Afrofuturism ...... 16 (Re)Presenting Queer Utopia: Marking Place by Claiming Space ...... 23 Queer Sexuality: The Use Value of “Loose Swinging Meat” ...... 28 Queer Desire: Qualifying “The Old Longing” ...... 35

3 IGNITING THE RECOGNITION: RACE AND THE UNDEAD CITY IN COLSON WHITEHEAD’S ZONE ONE ...... 43

Introducing the Zombie Narrative ...... 43 The Paradox of a Middling Black Post-human Body ...... 50 Post-human Possibility and Anti-exceptionalism ...... 53 Living Memory in the Urban Post-Apocalypse ...... 57 Peddling the Re-mapped Metropolis ...... 59 The Future(s) of Post-Apocalyptic Urban Imagination ...... 64 Afrofuturist Urban Planning ...... 67

4 A LASTING TRUTH: OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S AFROFUTURIST PEDAGOGY AND DIGITAL LEARNING PRAXIS ...... 71

Introducing Afrofuturist Pedagogy ...... 71 Minding the Gap: Placemaking, Digital Citizenship, and Class(room) Participation ...... 77 Placemaking and Process ...... 86 Democracy and Digital Pedagogical Engagement ...... 91 Space Making and Queer Pedagogical Community ...... 98 The Utopian Project and Education ...... 105

vii Defining Queer Space and Community in Critical Pedagogical Practice ...... 110 Afrofuturism Online: Creating an Imaginative Digital Learning Praxis ...... 115 Adaptive Knowledge Building and Afrofuturist Instructional Design .. 122 An Open Conclusion: Pedagogical Worldbuilding and Imaginative Change ...... 127

5 CONCLUSION: AFROFUTURIST AUDIOTOPIA AND CREATIVE KNOWLEDGE-WORK ...... 136

On Being Heard ...... 136 Cyndi Mayweather and the Afrofuturist Concept Album ...... 139 The Dissertation as Creative Knowledge-Work ...... 145

REFERENCES ...... 155

Appendix

A SOUNDSCAPES ...... 174

viii LIST OF FIGURES

1: A Framework for Emergent Strategies. Chart from adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change and Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 50. Print...... 116

ix ABSTRACT

Afrofuturism is a radical Black movement that situates race, gender, and sexuality within discussions of technology and creative worldbuilding. This project examines afrofuturist works1 that expand utopia and center Black folx in imaginative visions of change. I turn to works from Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Colson

Whitehead, and Janelle Monáe which offer future visions of Black identity and inclusive queer placemaking in technologically mediated, public discourse. While I build on scholarship that grapples with Black futurity, this project is distinguished by its focus on the complexities of queer worldbuilding in heteronormative futurescapes, the role of traumatic memory in speculative urban planning, and the transformative potential of afrofuturist pedagogical practices in digital learning spaces.

This project explores Black post-human embodiment and municipal governance in real and imagined urban spaces. It also offers a careful examination of queer teaching and learning that foster critical digital citizenship for Black folx and other marginalized peoples. I turn to the Black Speculative Arts Movement and audiotopia to frame this project as a creative intellectual artifact that embraces imaginative practices and connected processes of “becoming” through aurality and critical listening. I conclude with a call to honor creative knowledge-work and reflect

1 Here and elsewhere in the proposal “works” refer to multimodal artifacts that include, but are not limited to, audio, video and written objects—all of which are specifically impacted by form and content. Although an in-depth discussion of form is beyond the scope of this project, I argue that afrofuturism demands a broad definition of work because the content of Black history and culture is not bound exclusively to literary production. Thus, I read literature, music, video, and various digital artifacts as part of a utopic vision that stems from the African-American quest for freedom.

x on the meaning, purpose, and costs of “the dissertation” as a traditional capstone project for doctoral studies in the humanities.

xi Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: AFROFUTURISM, UTOPIA, AND IMAGINATION

Conceptual Genealogy and Framework

Becoming is a heavy thing; it is nuanced negotiation and prophesy; it is sacred.

This project constitutes a process of becoming that connects afrofuturism, embodied imagination, and multiplex worldbuilding efforts. Throughout this project, I examine afrofuturist works that center Black folx in expanded utopic visions—works that reframe and extend the telos of freedom that derives from historical narratives of enslavement and emancipation. These works offer hopeful futures in which Black folx become central agents of social justice and creative change.

Cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term afrofuturism in “Black to the Future:

Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose” (1994). He turned to

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to define “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” (180).

Since “Black to the Future,” a growing body of scholarship has emerged concerning

1 the intersection of technology and Black culture.2 The term now encompasses more than Dery’s original formulation.3

Afrofuturism suggests a “cultural aesthetic” that privileges the examination and recodification of speculative identity and technology through the interpretive lens of Black culture.4 Building on this definition, Marleen Barr highlights afrofuturism’s potential for women and ethnic minorities as “Science Fiction’s newest New-Wave trajectory.” Barr, Madhu Dubey, Ruth Salvalggio, and Samuel Delany challenge and restructure Dery’s “masculinist foundation” (xiv). Over the last decade, a host of scholars, including Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, have worked to identify

“contemporary expressions of afrofuturism emerging in the areas . . . that are described as ‘2.0,’ in response to the emergence of social media and other

2 Including but not limited to Marleen Barr’s work in Afrofuturist Females (2010), DeWitt Douglas Kilgore’s work in Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (2003), Alondra Nelson’s work in the germinal Afrofuturism issue of Social Text (2002), and Kwodo Eshun’s studies of Black cyberculture, music and film. 3 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 179–223, at 180. 4 Alondra Nelson’s edited “Afrofuturism” issue of Social Text (2002), De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), Marleen S. Barr’s edited volume Afro-Future Females (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), Isiah Lavender III’s Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), Ytasha L. Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013), and Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones’s edited Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016) have all endeavored to expand the definition of afrofuturism by including a range of texts and technological approaches.

2 technological advances since the middle of the last decade.”5 But how do we read subversive narratives from afrofuturism’s pioneering texts in relationship to contemporary afrofuturist discourses which explore queer liminality in works like

Samuel Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967) and unpack intersectional marginalization through “Astro-Blackness”?6

This dissertation project responds to Reynaldo Anderson and tobias c. van veen’s recent 2018 call to rethink afrofuturism “as it intersects genres and fields from education, spirituality and science to engineering, the arts and the humanities,

[through] its technocultural aesthetics and remix practices” (12-13). I respond to this call by grappling with multimodal afrofuturist work that is situated both within and beyond the literary genres of science fiction and utopian fiction. This work—and the folx who create it—use the Black imaginary to racialize the long-running discussion of utopia and dystopia found in the work of Ernst Bloch, Darko Suvin, Herbert

Marcuse, and Fredrick Jameson. The afrofuturist work I examine in this dissertation retools racial mythologies about technology and culture that have subsisted since

“slavery days” and have limited the representation of Black culture in discussions about the utopic impulse and in visions of the future; it also honors the lived experiences of Black folx in America today, as we look to the future.

5 Anderson and Jones, Afrofuturism 2.0, ix. 6 Ibid.

3 Here I read cyborg bodies, alien minds, and digital spirits as fantastic components of the Black imaginary that allow afrofuturists to speak to the painful history of race and gender relations in this indelibly Western nation.7 Author and cultural critic Charles Saunders supports this reading with his call to reform the

“mythology of our technological culture” through Black imagination and science fiction. Toni Morrison, who is not immediately associated with genre studies, makes similar assertions about her use of imagination to re-form the past.

In Playing in the Dark (1993), Morrison maintains that the act of writing involves a dialogue between forgotten and “re-membered” histories —especially for

Black writers who exist in a “genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world” (4).8

Consequently, she challenges writers and readers to imagine beyond the sociopolitical discourse of the past and present in order to realize change. While Morrison uses the

7 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussions of exceptionalism, histories of empire and the “culture wars” of the 1990’s in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999). This project focuses specifically on works in the U.S. Other works in the broader African Diaspora are beyond the scope of this dissertation. 8 Morrison writes: “My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming” (4 italics in original). This dissertation’s focus on imagining and becoming is linked to Morrison’s worldbuilding work as a Black woman.

4 terms “imagining” and “becoming” to engage the silences of Black history, I use these terms to position Black voices of the future.

To “imagine” is to create a fantasy—however realistic—and to “become” is to make that fantasy into reality—however fantastic.9 Thus, I see imagining and becoming as essential to afrofuturist texts that seek to re-present reality through subversive reclamations of history. I read these texts as future histories that use science fiction concepts, such as post-humanism and genetic mutation, to re-present technology and to “signify” on the legacy of race and gender relations in this country—like the “double voiced,” “trickster figure” that relishes “plurality, plurivocality, and ambiguity” (Hynes 9).10 In my view, the revelatory and cataclysmic discourses of afrofuturism challenge readers who assume the future will be homogenously “post-racial” and heteronormatively “post-gender.”

Darko Suvin, renowned critic of science fiction, speaks of “description” and

“prescription” when reading science fiction. Although Suvin deals broadly with theories of utopia and “politico-epistemic reality,” and not specifically with race or

9 The connection between imagining and becoming speaks to an urgent reality for Black folx who much grapple with the realities of policing, socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and technological oppression in pursuit of the fantastic “American Dream.” 10 Although the term “future histories” does not appear until John W. Campbell Jr. uses it in the February 1941 issue of Amazing Stories, I see traces of its conception in earlier afrofuturist works by W.E.B Dubois and George Schuyler. Scholarship on posthumanism has changed considerably since Donna Haraway’s foundational “Cyborg manifesto.” Sheryl Vint’s work on genetic manipulation and subjective embodiment in her monograph Bodies of Tomorrow (2007) is one of many notable examples.

5 gender, he lays bare the myth of hegemonic objectivity that this dissertation similarly questions. Suvin maintains:

we need not only new maps but also new conventions of cartography, mapping threadings through simultaneous and alternative times. For one example: description gets very complicated when the only way to do that is to interweave it with prescription supplying values and opening the presuppositions up to the reader’s judgment: ‘pure’ description…is insidiously on the side of the Powers-That-Be, while prescription is overtly and clearly on the side it chooses (4)

Here, Suvin highlights the concept of re-mapping that is prevalent in science fiction literature and that, I claim, is particularly prevalent in afrofuturist texts. He provides a complex critique of the privileged “presuppositions” that readers often interpret as objective realities. If we read these “maps” and the conventions of cartography as ideologically determined, as I suggest, we can read the privileged presuppositions as ideologically determined as well.

This dissertation works in dialogue with Suvin’s construction of maps and afrofuturist historical presuppositions of whiteness and heteronormativity in imagined futures. I mine Colson Whitehead’s vison of New York City in Zone One’s (2011) zombified post-apocalypse for lessons about mapping traumatic memories and Black embodiment in afrofuturist urban spaces. I also explore the ways educator-scholars might remap teaching and learning practices in digital space. This dissertation project turns to Octavia Butler’s “The Book of Martha” (2003) and Fledgling (2005) for alternative “descriptions” and “prescriptions” that re-form presuppositions about

Black subjectivity and agency in afrofuturist pedagogy and critical instructional design.

6 Afrofuturist works offer “new conventions” that engage Suvin’s challenge to rethink the purity of description and to map “simultaneous and alternative times” for

Black discursive subjects. There is no “pure” description within afrofuturist texts; they are already burdened by the “impurity” of historical othering and alienation. These texts shift focus from the dystopic descriptions of Suvin’s “Powers-That-Be” to the utopic prescriptions of the powers that can be—prescriptions that, I suggest, are laden with what cultural critic and literary historian Jean Pfaelzer refers to as “ideological critique[s] of ideology… [that] simultaneously project and subvert contemporary discourse about history” (23).

The term “immanence” is particularly useful for my discussion of afrofuturist texts because it can speak to an underlying racial reality that has been repressed by dominant cultural ideologies. Ernst Bloch uses immanence to refer to both the potential and limits of ideology in his reading of European history of World War II and the Holocaust.11 For Bloch, “everything obsolete” has the potential to “drift back into place.” This is to say, historical systems of dominance and inequality will replicate themselves if “fraudulent hope” prevails and proper attention is not paid to the “immanent” utopic impulses—or hope—that guide us through change.

Afrofuturist works comment on the potential for histories to “drift back into place” because the troubled realities of chattel slavery and racial discrimination are

11 The term “immanence” gains traction throughout Bloch’s work. It is a reference to the resource—or impulses—within an individual that have not yet been acted upon.

7 never far from Black cultural consciousness. Bloch’s analysis supports his concept of fraudulent hope— including nationalist propaganda, weak-willed intellectual posturing, the dangerous strivings of the petite bourgeoisie, and genocidal historical realities. I extend Bloch’s concept by linking fraudulent hope to racial oppression.

This dissertation turns to Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) to critique fraudulent hope and destabilize historical systems of racial inequality that limits representations of “self-conscious” Black subjects. Using Bloch’s notion of the “self- encounter” as a way to solidify connections between racial representation and utopia, I maintain that the “self-encounter” can be placed in dialogue with W.E.B Du Bois’s discussion of “double consciousness” and “the veil” in Souls of Black Folk (1903).12

Cognizance of Dubois’s veil and of its underlying suggestion of “double- consciousness” matters deeply to utopian discourse in general and specifically to

Bloch’s theory of the self-encounter because it brings to light the paradox of

“refraction” that separates the communal “spheres of existence” from individual subjectivity. The afrofuturist experience of hope lies in its capacity to lift the veil and represent a Black “self” that is doubly cognizant of the vexed concepts of freedom and inequality. To be sure, discussions surrounding the veil often confront issues of historical representation through refracted racial ideologies that are regularly read as

12 Bloch’s conception of the “self-encounter” forwards the idea that “the actuality of our reality does not always match up with our experience of it” (7). This assumes reflexivity in one’s subject positioning. For Bloch, the process of producing oneself is always already in dialogue with the process of re-producing “reality.” I argue that Dubois’ theories add race to this reality.

8 displaced manifestations of traditional—specifically “White American”—thought.13

Bloch is concerned with European history and does not reference Dubois, but I read his work as supporting Dubois’s critique. I contend that both analyze the “fraudulent hope” inherent in the historical “longing” for essentialist depictions of marginalized groups. I also explore the issues this longing creates for Black folx who wish to provide alternatives to white “utopian communities” that are “…paradoxically separate and distinct from, yet fundamentally related to,” their own (Souls, xxi).14

As author and critic Samuel Delany argues in “Racism and Science Fiction,”

“Racism…has always appeared to be first and foremost a system largely supported by material and economic conditions at work in a field of social traditions” (383). Given the connections I see between “double-consciousness” and a racialized utopic impulse,

Fredrick Jameson’s discussions on multiple—sometimes simultaneous—utopias is particularly important to my project. Jameson describes the post-modern utopia as multivalent and fraught with issues of flawed representation. He proposes: “The fundamental dynamic of any utopian politics (or of any political Utopianism)

13 In his introduction to the 1989 Bantam edition of Dubois’ Souls of Black Folks, Henry Louis Gates argues that “the African American's attempt to gain self- consciousness in a racist society will always be impaired by the fact that any reflected image that he or she seeks in the gaze of White Americans is refracted...This refracted public image is distinct from the Black self-image within his or her own cultural sphere of existence, one that is paradoxically separate and distinct from, yet fundamentally related to, White American culture. Nevertheless, it demands that Blacks veil or mask their cultural selves whenever they enter into the larger public discourse engaging in a shared ethnic or cultural schizophrenia” (xxi). 14 See Henry L. Gates’ “Introduction” to Dubois’ The Soul of Black Folks.

9 will…always lie in the dialectic of Identity and Difference, in the degree to which such a politic aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing, a system radically different from this one” (5). Here, Jameson uses imagining as a contested term that prefaces radical difference.

By accepting the postmodern conceptualization of utopia that Jameson presents in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), my project advances a notion of utopia that specifically engages the Black imaginary and its attendant “collective framings” of production which, I suggest, include “both the historic originalities of late capitalism – its cybernetic technology as well as its globalizing dynamics – and the emergence, as well, of new subjectivities such as the surcharge of multiple subject positions characteristic of postmodernity” (14). These collective framings help us build Black anti-capitalist, anti-racist, queer worlds that affirm historically contextualized social change. They also help us critique utopic visions that flatten history and difference through technological mediation.

At base, this project presents a future archive that challenges a “deliberately rubbed out” past by reorienting readers to “revelatory” and “cataclysmic” voices of freedom-minded Black subjects who center discussions of race, gender, and sexuality in their work. While I build on scholarship that grapples with Black futurity, this project is distinguished by its focus on the complexities of queer placemaking in heteronormative futurescapes, the role that traumatic memory plays in speculative urban planning, and strategies for transformative pedagogical practices in digital learning spaces. I use a transdisciplinary and multi-modal approach to tackle these

10 ambitious interventions which I frame in relationship to worldbuilding and processes of becoming. Although each chapter in this project can stand alone as an individual scholarly artifact, they all contribute to a greater, simultextual whole; they also reach back while moving forward.15

Organizational Framework and Critical Engagement

This is a born-digital dissertation that uses hyperlinks and footnotes to democratize the reading process and provide readers with multiple points of engagement in each chapter. This approach connects readers to podcasts, songs, recordings of academic panels, public debates, music, and other resources. It also makes room for contextual annotation, poetry, prose, and a diverse collection of purposeful rabbit holes. Footnotes are especially important for the digital teaching and learning discussion I offer later in this project.16 But I encourage you, dear reader, to engage with these intertextual materials as you navigate each simultextual chapter.17

15 See P Gabrielle Foreman’s discussion of “Sankofa” in her essay “A Riff, A Call, and A Response” (2013). 16 This footnoting practice is in dialogue with adrienne maree brown’s footnoting approach in Emergent Strategy (2017) and Tressie Macmillan Cottom’s approach in Thick (2019). I engage with both texts in Chapter 4: “A Lasting Truth: Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist Pedagogy and Digital Learning Praxis.” 17 Among other things, I conceive of materials offered in hyperlinks and footnotes as salt in this project’s conceptual stew. They also honor the work that, I argue, is essential to afrofuturist becoming.

11 In Activist Sentiments, literary historian P. Gabrielle Foreman argues that simultextuality encourages “multiple modes of interpretation” that “complicate the ways in which Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is traditionally read and affirms an alternative interpretation” (20). She distinguishes simultextuality from subversive subtext in Incidents. For Foreman, simultexts present “interpretive paths that offer equally substantive, often competing, simultaneously rendered reading modalities” (20). While Foreman deploys the term for nineteenth-century texts and reading practices, I recognize its value as a lens for interpreting twentieth century and twenty-first century afrofuturist texts and for engaging with the transmodal creative knowledge-work I present in this dissertation project.

This dissertation enacts synesthetic, non-linear worldbuilding. In the concluding chapter, I assert that this project engages with afrofuturist concept albums that establish future-focused narratives of struggle, hope, and social change in relationship to historical, rhizomatic patterns in sonic space. In order to represent some of the sonic narratives at work within this dissertation’s conceptual spaces, I’ve created a soundscape for each chapter.18 These curated assemblages reveal, resonate with, and reinforce the conceptual patterns of this project. They also encourage “a sort of intellectual unbuttoning”19 that facilitates digestion. I’ve hyperlinked each

18 A.V Carson’s dissertation album establishes a precedent for embedding sonic narratives within dissertation projects. Carson discusses his creative knowledge-work and pedagogical approach on NPR’s All Things Considered. 19 See Rachel Cusk’s Coventry: Essays (2019) in which she describes “intellectual unbuttoning” as “a freedom from the constraint of language.”

12 soundscape within its corresponding chapter title and have embedded opportunities for serendipitous discoveries within and between each space. Enjoy as the spirit moves you.

In Chapter 2, “Queer Afrofuturism: Utopia, Sexuality, and Desire in Samuel

Delany’s ‘Aye, and Gomorrah,’” I examine the multiple queer identities readers encounter in Samuel Delany's “Aye, and Gomorrah” through an afrofuturist lens.20

Delany, a queer Black author, presents contrasting depictions of sexuality and desire in the narrative’s contested queer spaces. Chapter 2 argues that Delany’s short story positions queer utopia, sexuality, and desire within a sublimated discourse of race. The story's portrayal of marginalized groups such as gay voyeurs, fetishistic “frelks,” and genetically engineered “spacers” introduces contemporary readers to early, unique, developments in queer afrofuturism and its relationship to queer utopian community and posthuman embodiment.

Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) works in dialogue with historical pre- figurations of the marginalized Black body. In Chapter 3, “Igniting the Recognition:

Race and the Undead City in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One,” I examine how

Whitehead uses the zombie narrative form to present a utopian Black everyman.

Whitehead’s narrative challenges historical depictions of Black bodies as marginalized objects. I argue that Zone One constructs post-apocalyptic New York as a redeemable

20 The article version of this chapter won the Eugenio Battisi Award in 2018 for best article in Utopian Studies. For this, I am grateful.

13 undead figure that offers simultextual depictions of afrofuturist urbanity through “re- membered” history, contemporary city-planning practices, and Black post-human imagination.

The struggle for inclusive cultural representation in technologically mediated public discourse can be traced back to systemic pedagogical practices that devalue generative difference and critical imagination. In Chapter 4, “A Lasting Truth: Octavia

Butler’s Afrofuturist Pedagogy and Digital Learning Praxis,” I propose a counter- vision of future-focused education for students and educator-scholars of color whose pedagogical presence can disrupt expectations about teaching and learning in technologically mediated spaces. This chapter positions Octavia Butler’s “The Book of Martha” and Fledgling as speculative case studies for afrofuturist instructional design that situate Black queer communities in critical digital teaching and learning spaces.

This project’s final offering, Chapter 5: “Conclusion: Afrofuturist Audiotopia and Creative Knowledge-Work” extends the discussion of collaborative knowledge- building and queer learning communities to Janelle Monáe’s afrofuturist concept albums. I suggest that Janelle Monáe uses the concept album to present a version of audiotopic worldbuilding that analyzes the appropriation and consumption of queer

Black identity in popular culture. I look specifically to Janelle Monáe’s worldbuilding and position her efforts in a larger conversation about afrofuturist music, creative knowledge-work, and imaginative possibilities for the dissertation genre. I also reflect

14 on this dissertation’s efforts at academic worldbuilding, in order to memorialize a difficult process of becoming and to model a simultextual, scholarly, politics of self.

I end this this project by returning to fraudulent hope and the knowledge regimes that privilege and fund “traditional” approaches to academic worldbuilding.

Chapter 5 examines the pedagogical efficacy of the dissertation genre and questions its persistent presence as the de facto capstone project for doctoral studies in the humanities. I offer ways to encourage “non-traditional” options for creative knowledge-work through this dissertation project and through future projects to come.

At base, these options 1) are legible and accessible to folx outside of cloistered disciplinary spaces, 2) encourage committee members to grapple with the diverse forms of professional expertise, mentorship practices, and work that doctoral education makes possible, 3) honor the energy and labor that intensive multi-year projects demand, 4) challenge traditional constructions of the dissertation as a “proto- book” document, and 5) make room for transmodal narratives and storytelling approaches that speak to diverse peoples and publics. These options also encourage academic worldbuilding that affirms creative engagement with queer afrofuturist works such as Samuel Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which I explore in the next chapter and throughout its connected soundscape.

15 Chapter 2

QUEER AFROFUTURISM: UTOPIA, SEXUALITY, AND DESIRE IN

SAMUEL DELANY’S “AYE, AND GOMORRAH”

Introducing Queer Afrofuturism

“Us-and-Them fiction” of any sort has never particularly interested me…Identity is basically a synonym for category, and while categories make language possible, they make problems in life—especially when you try to assign subjects to them. People almost never fit, or never fit for long. —Samuel Delany

In a 2015 interview with Cecilia D’Anastasio, Samuel Delany shares his motivations for writing science fiction from his position as a queer Black man. Despite his trepidation about the limiting “categories” within “us-and-them-fiction,” and the dangers of essentialist identity politics, Delany notes that his positionality is embedded in each of his texts—even when the protagonists are heterosexual, Asian, Native

American, or mixed race. His short story “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967) offers a prescient narrative that springs from a utopic impulse to create safe spaces suggest the fictive spaces—from Paris to Istanbul—for queer communities and for people who do not fit prescribed sexual categories.21 He turns to science fiction to depict hidden tensions between marginalized sexual expression and potential social acceptance via a

21 See Samuel R. Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah,” in Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 101–11; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

16 dystopian narrative that chronicles dangerous frustrated encounters within queer communities.

Sexuality in “Aye, and Gomorrah” is both by-product of and counternarrative to the history of oppressive heteronormativity in the United States. Published in 1967 amid counterculture movements, “Aye, and Gomorrah” confronts normative sexual, racial, and gender paradigms. 22 The short story also presages Delany’s evolving interest in deconstructing the sociopolitical ideologies that underpin restrictive sexual practices in his later essays, interviews, nonfiction, and fiction, including Dhalgren

(1978), Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984), Silent Interviews (1994),

Longer Views (1996), Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), and Through the

Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012).23

In “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “spacers”—who are interstellar laborers—supplement their income by selling sex to “frelks,” who fetishize the spacers’ genetically engineered, ostensibly genderless, bodies. In the short story, an unnamed, undefined government genetically conditions spacers to perform manual labor in a radioactive cosmos. A program of genetic manipulation creates a cadre of identifiably androgynous, infertile laborers—supporting James Scott’s suggestion that socially

22 See Rob Latham’s “Sextrapolation in New Wave Science Fiction” (Science Fiction Studies 33, no. 2 [2006]: 251–74), in which he investigates the increasingly explicit, and subversive, sexual content of new-wave science fiction during the 1960s. 23 See Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1978; New York: Vintage, 2001); Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (New York: Bantam Books, 1984); Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (New York: Magnus Books, 2012).

17 constructed minority identities are at first “imagined by powerful states.”24 The spacers’ sterility and purported lack of desire link their social identities with their ability to work in hazardous extraterrestrial spaces—including the Earth’s moon and the satellites of Jupiter.

In a 1994 reprint of “Aye, and Gomorrah,” Delany suggests that developments in popular attitudes toward sexual difference may affect how we continue to interpret sexuality and desire in the short story. He writes, “I’m not sure how the change in the social status of homosexuality . . . and the like have changed the way we read [“Aye, and Gomorrah”] today. Ask me what the story is about now, however and I’ll probably say it’s somehow about the desire for desire” (226). Extending Delany’s efforts to revise and reframe queer longing in relationship to contemporary discussions of queer identity, I suggest that “Aye, and Gomorrah” provides readers with a narrative of emergent queer afrofuturism. Readers encounter marginalized bodies in many afrofuturist texts; but Delany codifies and queers these bodies in “Aye, and

Gomorrah” by exploring the sexual implications of the Native American narrator’s genetic conditioning. I read this short story as a queer afrofuturist work because of

Delany’s explicitly expressed subject position as a gay Black male, and his practice of infusing his positionality within each of his texts, no matter the narrator’s race.

24James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), xii.

18 “Aye, and Gomorrah” contributes to a variety of hopeful queer afrofuturist spaces as it represents marginalized sexual communities within a world of genetically engineered social stratification. When spacers “come down” from space, they “cruise” through public places looking for erotic exchanges. While traveling, the narrator hopes to assuage an “old longing” for intimacy, despite having been bioengineered and ostensibly genderless. The narrator’s trek allows Delany to depict France, the United

States, Mexico, and Turkey through the eyes of a queered outcast who holds out hope for social acceptance, while positioning dystopian sexuality within afrofuturist utopian discourse. Delany grounds discourse both in “what is around us” and in “things that contravene what we expect.”

In his essay “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire,” Delany argues that discourse is a learned system of language that saturates texts and helps determine all readings—where writers can “suffuse one discourse with a systematically different discourse and watch the places where strain and tension result.”25 By exploring the potential future of queer community “Aye, and Gomorrah” provides examples of how such “strain and tension” also inhere in afrofuturism, because, as Lisa Yaszek suggests, “afrofuturism is not just about reclaiming the history of the past, but about

25 Samuel R. Delany, “The Rhetoric of Sex, the Discourse of Desire,” in Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 268

19 reclaiming the history of the future.”26 The chance to reshape our current and future social world is particularly important for queer(ed) subjects of color—whose bodies are often physical reminders of historical disparities in sociopolitical representation.

I argue that “Aye, and Gomorrah” expands afrofuturism’s discursive potential by representing queer utopia, sexuality, desire, and post-human embodiment. Queer theorist Ana-Maurine Lara suggests that Black artists/authors such as James Baldwin,

Ishmael Reed, and Nalo Hopkinson “reconfigure the relationship between history and the self, between the self and the future,” in order to “rupture expectations of all that has been, is, and will be.”27 “Aye, and Gomorrah” makes similar interventions by representing queer sexuality in futurist terms. The narrator’s Native American ancestry is the sole reference to racial history in the short story, and Blackness does not appear explicitly in the text; however, “Aye, and Gomorrah” is a significant afrofuturist text because it represents a queer Black perspective by way of a marginalized Native

American narrator. In his interview with The Nation, Delany notes, “All the experiences that [I] used in my own stories and books were Black experiences—why?

Because they were mine.”28 In “Aye, and Gomorrah” the dialogue between the

26 Lisa Yaszek, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future,” Socialism and Democracy 20, no. 3 (2006): 41–60, accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08854300600950236, at 47. Yaszek provides a history of afrofuturist texts in her insightful essay. 27 Ana-Maurine Lara, “Of Unexplained Presences, Flying Ife Heads, Vampires, Sweat, Zombies, and Legbas: A Meditation on Black Queer Aesthetics,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18 (2012): 347–59, at 349, 357. 28 In Cecilia D’Anastasio, “Samuel R. Delany Speaks,” Nation, August 24, 2015, accessed July 7, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/samuel-r-delany-speaks/.

20 unnamed narrator and an obsessed artistic frelk compels readers to confront the narrator’s complex identity as a—self-proclaimed—“American red Indian” and to consider the narrator’s development in relationship to Delany’s experiences and self- questioning as a Black gay writer.

Delany often represents dialogic reflection through the subjects who inhabit his texts. Carl Freedman views Delany as an author “engaged in a practice of endless dialectical revision—a practice of unceasing questioning and self-questioning—in which nothing is ever taken on pure faith.”29 Jeffery Tucker attributes Delany’s interest in discourse and subjectivity to Delany’s ambiguous subjecthood.30

Referencing Delany’s autobiographical The Motion of Light in Water (1988), Tucker argues that Delany’s identity and writing are correctives for the historically whitewashed, heteronormative science fiction.31 Tucker seeks to “read—or invent—

29 Carl H. Freedman, ed., Conversations with Samuel R. Delany (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), ix. 30 See Jeffrey A. Tucker, A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957– 1965 (New York: Arbor House/W. Morrow, 1988); Stephanie A. Smith, “A Most Ambiguous Citizen: Samuel R. ‘Chip’ Delany,” American Literary History 19, no. 2 (2007): 557–70. 31 Tucker, Sense of Wonder, 1–2. See Sandra Govan, “The Insistent Presence of Black Folx in the Novels of Samuel R. Delany,” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 2 (1984): 43–48.

21 Delany as an African-American writer . . . [whose] race is a field that overlaps, intersects, and is contiguous with his other identities.”32

“Aye, and Gomorrah” presents a future of overlapping and contrasting queer identities that challenge the systemic marginalization of queer discourses occurring before and during the story’s original publication. The short story also alludes to

Delany’s own travels abroad in the mid-1960s—a time in which expressions of queer sexuality were invisible to many members of the science fiction community. In an interview with Joseph Beam, Delany notes that heteronormativity engendered considerable social anxiety in queer individuals—regardless of their racial or ethnic affiliation.33 In “Aye, and Gomorrah,” spacers are both anxious about and resentful of their genetically engineered, androgynous bodies, which define their queer identities and shape their social interactions in the text. By omitting gendered pronouns for spacers, Delany positions the group in a liminal discursive space and marginalizes their “in-between bodies”—a concept that Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo uses to describe the intersectionality of embodied sexual, racial, and gendered difference.34 Spacers fail to connect with any of the gendered queer communities they encounter because of their liminal, posthuman bodies. Like other historically marginalized, queered, and/or

32 Tucker, Sense of Wonder, 48. Delany further explores the postmodern practices of deconstruction and decentering in his essays on paraliterature, sexuality, and “centered-subjecthood.” See Samuel R. Delany, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1999. 33 In Joseph Beam, ed., In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (Boston: Alyson, 1986), 3. 34 Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, In-Between Bodies: Sexual Difference, Race, and Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).

22 raced individuals, spacers combat their social exclusion by searching for a utopic

“good place”—even as they “come down” to and are then “evicted” from locations around the globe.

(Re)Presenting Queer Utopia: Marking Place by Claiming Space

Queer identity is central to the spacers’ vision of Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens, particularly when the spacers’ geographic mobility warps their vision and displaces the reader in time and space. Travel is often used as a metaphor for transformation and a device for shifting space/time in utopian literature.35 The spacers’ arrival in the gardens propels this tradition into queer territory. Their story begins in medias res:

“And came down in Paris: Where we raced along the Rue de Medicis with Bo and Lou and Muse inside the fence, Kelly and me outside, making faces through the bars, making noise, making the Luxembourg Gardens roar at two in the morning” (101).

The opening conjunction “and” prefigures the spacers’ cyclical narrative—bridging the gap between where readers first encounter the spacers and where the spacers were before they “came down” outside the gardens. They hit the ground running, searching for a social and emotional “good place.” To be sure, the Luxembourg Gardens’ new geographic and discursive space initially suggests utopia to the spacers. The fence

35 For further discussion of utopia and travel, see Louis Marin, “Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993): 397–420; and J. C. Davis, “Going Nowhere: Travelling to, Through, and from Utopia,” Utopian Studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 1–23.

23 does not perturb them, and they make faces through the railings, ridiculing the implied containment that exists on either side of its “bars”; they express their jouissance at two in the morning, racing along the Rue de Medicis, initially unaware of the homosexual activity in the “pissoirs” around them.

Significantly, “Aye, and Gomorrah” is a pre-Stonewall text that lends a transnational perspective to historian David Carter’s discussions of public and private sexuality during and after the Stonewall riots across the Atlantic in New York City.

The historic demonstration at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village on June 28,

1969, arose just two years after the original publication of “Aye, and Gomorrah.”

Carter maintains, “While gay men and women in the 1960s were pressured into keeping their sexual lives very closeted, they succeeded in creating a diverse subculture. Then as now, the lesbian and gay male community had its own divisions and subcultures based on everything from sex, to sexual proclivities, to class and race.”36 Considering the closeted nature of queer communities in the 1960s, I read

Delany’s depiction of the garden as a utopic vision of this subculture—even if its queer utopia emerges as a dystopic space for the marginalized spacers. The vision of the ubiquitous pissoir repositions homosexual history within Luxembourg Gardens’ sociopolitical space—queering the formal garden of the French Senate and countering de jure heterosexuality with de rigueur homosexuality.

36 David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 55.

24 Despite the spacers’ initial assumptions, the narrator soon realizes that the garden is no utopia for spacers. There is a second line of vision in which gay men claim a queer counter-space within the garden. Kelly, a spacer, recognizes it first:

“Kelly noticed what was going on around us, got an ashcan cover, and ran into the pissoir, banging the walls. Five guys scooted out; even a big pissoir only holds four”

(101). Kelly reads the crowded public restroom as a site for erotic exchange between gay men. The utopian potential lies in the Parisian men’s ability to express their sexual identity in a public space without reprisal. As the spacers encounter and interrupt the gay men’s implied sexual exchange, they subvert the narrator’s early vision of a good place and replace it with a less inviting image of the gay-friendly pissoir; we soon find that the spacers are not welcome in this place, because of their genetically engineered, genderless bodies.

The failed exchange between the spacers and the gay men in the Luxembourg

Gardens exemplifies the “divisions and subcultures” within queer communities before, and after, Stonewall. The narrator recalls: “A very blond young man put his hand on my arm and smiled. ‘Don’t you think, Spacer that you . . . people should leave? . . .

You look as though you may once have been a man. But now. . . .’ He smiled. ‘You have nothing for me now. The police.’ He nodded across the street where I noticed the gendarmerie for the first time. ‘They don’t bother us. You are strangers, though . . .’”

(101). The distinction between the spacers and the nameless “very blond young man” speaks to the narrator’s conflicting interpretations of spacer and gay identity. The narrator’s description also highlights the young man’s connection to a white male

25 ideal. The blond man’s suggestion that the gendarmerie do not “bother” them is fraught with expressions of privilege and power; gay men prevail in this exchange because representatives of the law—the police—tacitly consent to their claims.

Despite their queerness, both police and narrator still read the five gay “guys” as

“men.” In contrast, the spacers’ irreversible genetic engineering defines their position in queer society and obscures the gendered sexual beings that they may “once have been”; for the gay men, androgyny mars the spacers’ posthuman bodies and marginalizes the spacers’ desire for community and sexual exchange.

The spacers’ marginalization in the pissoir—and in the garden—also suggests a relationship among conceptualizations of utopia, space formation, and privileged queer sexual identity. Queer theorist José Muñoz links Ernst Bloch’s discussion of utopian spaces to public sexual expression and intentional utopian community- building. Muñoz describes queer space formation as “queer world-making” and argues that the proliferation of queer space and identity within “western” nations “hinges on the possibility to map a world where one is allowed to cast pictures of utopia and to include such pictures in a map of the social.”37 The blond man’s interaction with the spacers in the Luxembourg Gardens fulfills Muñoz’s terms; the man successfully maps his sexual/social identity onto the garden’s public space—making it both an example of his “queer world-making” and an expression of his privileged, utopic

37 José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 40.

26 territory. Gordon Ingram defines similarly contested queer spaces as “queerscapes.”

The concept describes the “competing notions of ‘public space’ use by sexual minorities that are related to divergent interpretations of acts and identities.”38

Homosexuals—not spacers—are the privileged “queers” in the garden’s discursive queerscape, and they legitimize their queer utopian community by defining and policing its social borders.

The dreaded “you people” signifier in the blond man’s question “Don’t you think

. . . you . . . people should go?” paradoxically queers the spacers and regulates sexual difference and discursive identity. The descriptor also has historical resonances— particularly in discussions of race in which the pronoun you and collective noun people are often laden with rhetorical significance and sly ambiguity. By denying spacers a place in the garden’s queer community, the gay men also deny the spacers’ claim to the garden’s delimited gay utopia. Still, the spacers continue their search for an acceptable and accepting community that understands their sexuality and the value of the narrator’s impotent “loose, swinging meat.”

38 Gordon Brent Ingram, “‘Open’ Space as Strategic Queer Sites,” in Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance, ed. Gordon B. Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter (Seattle: Bay Press, 1997), 96. Although a thorough engagement with Ingram’s theory concerning the “four kinds of overlapping relationships . . . that are central to the formation of queer space” is beyond the scope of this essay, Ingram does refer to Delany’s Mad Man (1994) as a “landscape of abjection” in which “there are kinds of cooperation . . . formed between people who have nowhere else to go—or who engage in certain contact or activities that are not tolerated elsewhere” (95, 101).

27 Queer Sexuality: The Use Value of “Loose Swinging Meat”

Queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman positions queer identity in relationship to racialized bodies in her effort to describe the “not yet culturally legible” traces of queer history.39 In “Aye, and Gomorrah,” however, these sexual and racial “traces” do not assume the “embodied non-rational forms” of “ghosts” or “gods” that Freeman reads in texts central to queer studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies;40 theses traces also do not assume the form of Black bodies in Delany’s short story—as they might in other afrofuturist texts. Instead, they take the form of spacer bodies— especially the narrator’s “loose, swinging meat.” The narrator’s genetically conditioned, impotent member is the “scarred” site, or dystopian novum, that contributes to queer studies and critical race theory; moreover, Delany’s efforts to grapple with this social and sexual scar throughout the short story are important to the developing discussion of sexual subjectivity in afrofuturist studies.41

39 Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 159–76, at 159. 40 Ibid. 41 As Jack Zipes notes in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Ernst Bloch and Darko Suvin “used the term Novum in various ways to demarcate the horizon line drawn by works that open up genuinely new possibilities to move forward in the world experiment” (in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988], xxxvii). Zipes’s introduction to the collection of essays also highlights the impact of Darko Suvin’s science fictional concept “novum.” See also Darko Suvin, “Novum Is as Novum Does,” in Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers, ed. Karen Sayer and John Moore (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 1-17.

28 Recalling the history of lynching, racial segregation, experimentation, and dehumanization in the United States, the government’s genetic conditioning program limits spacers’ prospects for intimacy and for social integration in the short story. The narrator’s loose swinging meat is an embodied form of social and sexual castration that results from the genetic conditioning program and epitomizes Delany’s queer afrofuturist aesthetic in “Aye, and Gomorrah;” it is a site for conflicting narratives in the spacer’s queer sexual identity—even as it challenges historical conventions that have (over)determined gendered social positioning.

The narrator’s queered relationships with frelks reflects the debilitating realities of “loose, swinging meat.” This embodied, genetically engineered “lack” evidences Elizabeth Freeman’s assertions about the culturally legible—and often biological—traces of queer history. The narrative represents a potential “future history” in which advances in biotechnology enable governments to create a new form of socially marginalized, posthuman chattel.

The narrator’s marginalization exists in the understudied territory between queer utopia and race studies. Ana-Maurine Lara argues for the importance of sustained critical engagement with “Black queer aesthetics.” She suggests that “the numerous absences and silences within formal archives, reflected in scholarship on

Black queer cultural productions . . . impel us to parse the characteristics and

29 genealogy of Black queer aesthetics and art.”42 The narrator’s impotent member embodies and resists this silence, as it “impels” readers to explore its significance to utopic future histories. His reproductive and erotic lack forces him to grapple with his longing for intimacy and his need to define his identity in relationship to established queer sexuality.

Despite their expulsion from Luxembourg Gardens, the spacers hold onto a utopic hope of meeting frelks. After quickly bypassing Houston, Texas, “where it all started,” and facing rejection in Matamoros, Mexico—by a queer woman who asks the narrator, “You look like you were once a woman, no?”—the spacers eventually “come down” in Istanbul, Turkey. In high spirits, Bo, one of the few named spacers in the narrators platoon, shares his memories of lashing out at a man and woman who attempted to pass as spacers. Bo’s violence reaffirms spacer sexual/social identity and exemplifies the “queer” values that undergird frelk/spacer relationships. After arriving in Istanbul, Bo narrates:

Last time I was in Istanbul—about a year before I joined up with this platoon—I remember we were coming out of Taksim Square down Istiqlal. Just past all the cheap movies we found a little passage lined with flowers. Ahead of us were two other spacers. It’s a market in there, and farther down they got fish, and then a courtyard with oranges and candy and sea urchins and cabbage. But flowers in front. Anyway, we noticed something funny about the spacers. It wasn’t their uniforms; they were perfect. The haircuts: fine. It wasn’t till we heard them talking—they were a man and woman dressed up like spacers, trying to pick up frelks! Imagine, queer for frelks! . . . We beat the hell out of them two, Bo concluded. We got them in a side street and went to town! (103)

42 Lara, “Of Unexplained Presences, Flying Ife Heads, Vampires, Sweat, Zombies, and Legbas,” 347.

Bo’s seemingly ancillary description of “cheap movies”—which presages a queer space that Delany explores in his “pornotopic fantasy” The Mad Man (1994) and later in his autobiographical Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)—characterizes the market beyond the flowered passageway. His narrative also acknowledges his— seemingly militaristic—“platoon’s” position in the system of commodity exchange in the market. The spacers are similar to the commodified fish, sea urchins, and cabbage sold beyond the flowered passage; and they emerge as consumable objects in Bo’s story.

Strengthening the metaphorical connection among consumption, commodification, and race, bell hooks argues that “when race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power over . . . the Other.”43 Although Bo’s story does not mention the spacers’ race, it does assume their othered positionality. To be sure, spacer identity operates as an alternative playground in Bo’s story, and the spacers opt to protect their identity and value by confronting “counterfeit” spacers.

Unlike Bo’s platoon, the unnamed man and woman are not “authentic” participants in the flower passageway’s hidden economy. As Bo suggests, the man and

43 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 367.

31 woman’s physical appearance—marked by their familiar spacer-like uniforms and haircuts—does not rouse the spacers’ suspicion. However, the man and woman’s language betrays them: “It wasn’t till we heard them talking—they were a man and woman dressed up like spacers, trying to pick up frelks!” Bo’s exclamation demonstrates what Delany describes as the “economic order of language” that determines discourse. In fact, one can read Bo’s incredulity—“Imagine, queer for frelks! . . .”—as a repudiation of competing discursive economies beyond the flowered passageway. The ellipsis following Bo’s exclamation emphasizes the interstitial space between the spacers’ queer identity and the man and woman’s assumed identity; it also marks the break between anxious thought and violent (re)action: “. . . We beat the hell out of them two, Bo concluded.” Bo’s story about the man and woman—who perform what Judith Butler might describe as spacer “drag”—suggests that spacers wish to protect their position and value as the hypersexualized, preeminent queer laborers of

“Aye, and Gomorrah.”44

Bo’s discomfort with the man and woman’s drag performance signifies his discomfort with their inauthentic identity; the spacer feels threatened by the man and woman’s masquerade because they are not truly androgynous. This is to say, Bo’s narrative within a narrative is anxious in its violence. In rehashing the encounter with other members of the narrator’s platoon, Bo expresses discomfort with the limited

44 See Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1990]), in which she discusses the performative nature of “drag.”

32 social and sexual capital afforded to genetically engineered posthumans, which all spacers face.45 Bo also expresses an impulse to maintain an identifiable spacer queerscape.

Bo’s narrative explains the logic behind the spacers’ wish to keep frelks from other sexual partners in their desired queerscape. Spacers fear devaluation in the flowered passageway and further marginalization in the queer community. Because gay men deny the spacers in the Luxembourg Gardens, and a queer woman also denies them in Matamoros, Mexico, they seek to reestablish dominance in the flowered passage—their privileged queerscape. The spacers’ raucous destruction of objects, such as the gate and the pissoir in the Luxembourg Gardens, evolves into physical violence against people in the flowered passageway in Istanbul. Bo and his platoon of spacers assault the man and woman to affirm their spacer dominance and sexual worth in the market.

Despite Bo’s protests, spacer bodies also emerge as an “alternative playground” beyond the flower passageway and throughout the narrative. The spacers’ precarious bodies allow readers to grapple with utopic embodiment in what Lucy Nicholas describes as an “ethics of non-closure.”46 Nicholas explores the theoretical potential of utopias that embrace androgyny in contrast to ones that require “totalizing unity” and

45 Strengthening the metaphor of consumption and the language of commodification, bell hooks discusses similar exchanges in terms of race and sexuality in her essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” in Black Looks. 46 See Annette Burfoot, “Human Remains: Identity Politics in the Face of Biotechnology,” Cultural Critique 53, no. 1 (2003): 47–71.

33 subsist by “foreclosing difference.” She notes that “by considering an ethics of non- closure to be the utopian telos or end-point rather than a particular vision or blueprint, and by considering androgyny to be a way of thinking and relating rather than a fixed way of being, it is possible to remain dedicated to a utopian post-identity queer and androgynous ethic” (136). However, Bo’s implied experiences with totalizing unity are a principal influence in the narrative. For Bo, and the spacer platoon that assaults the man and woman, Nicholas’s argument and vision of androgynous utopia has little efficacy. The violent expression shows that spacers’ androgynous identity matters more to them as “a way of being” than it does as a “way of thinking” or a particular way of seeing.

Bo eventually parts ways with the narrator and the spacer platoon after arriving in Istanbul, as they each look to “hunt up a rich frelk and come on friendly” (103). The continuous search for frelk companionship hints at the spacers’ economic position, including their need to supplement their income with genteel prostitution. It also hints at the narrator’s description of “the longing, the old longing” (103). This phrase appears only once in the text, after Kelly challenges the narrator for gaping at the prospect of receiving money from frelks. Like Bo, Kelly also turns to violence in his threats to “bust every bone” in the narrator’s “conditioned-from-puberty body” (103).

In this instance, Kelly reads the narrator’s silence as rejection and denial.

Kelly’s language resonates in Delany’s later description of historically restrictive social discourse in an interview with Josh Lukin after the publication of “Aye, and

Gomorrah.” He notes that “for those of us who are Black, or disabled, or overweight,

34 or Asian, or women, or gay, or part of whatever group we have been socially assigned to . . . if we didn’t know that discourse down in our bones, we’d be dead.”47 Delany’s austere personalization of abjection shapes the unnamed narrator of “Aye, and

Gomorrah.” No matter how close the narrator is to his prescribed “group,” his loose swinging meat marginalizes him in the overarching queer community.

Queer Desire: Qualifying “The Old Longing”

The narrator’s “old longing” references a utopic desire for stable, accepted, sexual identity, even as it exemplifies the problem of “loose, swinging meat”; but the narrative suggests that desire for companionship persists despite genetic conditioning.

In an unspoken response to Kelly’s plan to find a frelk and “come on friendly,” the narrator intimates, “There are times when yelling and helling won’t fill the lack. There are times when you must walk by yourself because it hurts so much to be alone” (104).

Still, after some members of his platoon travel east of Istanbul in attempts to “fill the lack,” the narrator finds company in an artistic frelk who is particularly enamored with the narrator’s post-humanity.

GerShun Avilez suggests that desire has the ability to create and negate space; he reads Delany’s Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984) for its representation of transgressive queer spaces and argues that “desire founds and destroys formally

47 In Josh Lukin, “The Wiggle Room of Theory: An Interview with Samuel Delany,” in Conversations with Samuel R. Delany, ed. Carl H. Freedman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 171; my emphasis.

35 designated spaces for existence and the logic that underpins them . . . [making] one little room an everywhere or a nowhere.”48 I argue that the narrator’s “old longing” remakes formally designated spaces and shapes the interaction with the unnamed frelk. In addition, it represents a utopic impulse for complete, intimate connection that is ultimately frustrated and unfulfilled.

One of the first things the frelk notices is the narrator’s skin. She assumes that he is Turkish because his complexion is “so dark,” but he explains that he is an

“American red Indian” (104). This is the only time in the narrative Delany mentions a spacer’s race; however, race contributes to the narrator’s difference and increases his value to the community of frelks who desire his dark skin: “‘I am Greek. I thought you might be Turkish because you are so dark.’ ‘American red Indian.’ I nodded. Her turn to curtsy” (104; emphasis mine). By acknowledging the narrator’s dark skin the frelk offers the text’s only reference to race, which Delany describes as “a system, largely supported by material and economic conditions at work in a field of social traditions.”49 The narrator suggests that the frelk curtsies at the revelation of his race, but race is not the frelk’s primary focus, supporting Edward Chan’s analysis of race and utopia in Delany’s later novel Triton (1976). Chan argues that in the novel, race is

“cosmetic—a surface controlled by a Subject’s desire. . . [without] signifying any

48 GerShun Avilez, “Cartographies of Desire: Mapping Queer Space in the Fiction of Samuel Delany and Dariek Scott,” Callaloo 34, no. 1 (2011): 126–42, at 131–32. 49 Samuel R. Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction,” New York Review of Science Fiction 120 (1998), http://www.nyrsf.com/racism-and-science-fiction-.html.

36 particular social identity.”50 Similarly, in “Aye, and Gomorrah,” the narrator’s racial identity only superficially affects the frelk’s desire.51 To be clear, I read this as an indicator of the narratives focus on sexuality, desire, and genetically conditioned embodiment. Although race is a component of the narrative, these foci are at its core.

For the frelk, the unnamed narrator’s genetic conditioning, and resulting loose swinging meat, overshadows his racial markers. Instead of building human connection with the narrator, the frelk dehumanizes all spacers and debases their social identity.

She explains: “I think the whole business is sad. . . . They could have found another way other than neutering you, turning you into creatures not even androgynous; things” (106). The contrast between her description and the gay man’s description of spacer bodies in Luxembourg Gardens exposes her anxiety about her spacer fetish.

50 Edward K. Chan, The Racial Horizons of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 108–9. 51 The representation of the future in “Aye, and Gomorrah” is, itself, queer. Theorist Douglas Kilgore examines the queer “resignification of the sexual customs” in his research about the intersections among race, utopia, and science fiction. To my mind, Kilgore’s argument mitigates the spacers’ charge against the man and woman who are “queer for frelks.” He suggests that “a future that seems queer from our perspective . . . would result from a resignification of the sexual customs we consider natural. Since our sexuality has as much to do with pleasure and power as with reproduction, such signification calls into question our possessive investments in race and gender, culture and nation—institutional structures by which we define what is natural and good or perverse and evil.” Kilgore highlights the relationship among sexuality, power, and the institutional significance of “signified” social customs. His argument explains the spacers’ “possessive investment” in their genetically modified queer identity and in their engineered posthuman “culture.” De Witt Douglas Kilgore, “Queering the Coming Race? A Utopian Historical Imperative,” in Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, ed. Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 237.

37 The gay man identifies spacers as “you people,” while the frelk constructs spacers as sympathetic, desirable “things.”

Paradoxically, the frelk frames her desire for spacers as a form of perversion in order to contextualize her self-described deviance. She equates her desire for spacers to desire for “unattainable” objects (106–7). Speaking to the narrator, she laments:

You have no perversions at all. You’re free of the whole business. I love you for that, spacer. My love starts with a fear of love. Isn’t that beautiful? A pervert substitutes something unattainable for ‘normal’ love: the homosexual, a mirror, the fetishist, a shoe or a watch or a girdle. . . .” “Frelks substitute”—she looked at me sharply again—“loose, swinging meat.” . . . “I want you because you can’t want me. That’s the pleasure. (107–8)

She prefers the narrator’s “loose, swinging meat” over “normal” love, but her talk of freedom rings hollow—especially as she evaluates and objectifies his impotent member. While Kelly and the other spacers substitute money for “normal” love, the narrator rejects the idea that money will fulfill “the old longing.” In lieu of genuine affection, the narrator longs for a substitution that has special importance to the frelk, pleading, “Give me something—it doesn’t have to be worth sixty lira. Give me something that you like, anything of yours that means something to you” (108). She refuses to pay because she does not wish to follow the established procedure of

“sexual” exchange between frelks and spacers. However, the narrator views the exchange as another form of specialized labor that deserves a modicum of emotional recompense. This impasse affects the representation of queer desire within the text and reframes the spacers’ ritual of denial in the flower passageway.

38 The narrator’s effort to mollify the old longing takes an important turn as they enter the frelk’s bedroom—the final space in the short story. Neither finds the exchange fulfilling, but the bedroom differs from the other failed utopic spaces in the narrative. The frelk’s utopic space illustrates Avilez’s argument about desire— particularly its ability to create “one little room” that is “an everywhere or a nowhere.”

The frelk creates a safe space in her bedroom. There she can relish in spacer identity and produce desirable objects without an obligatory monetary exchange or interaction.

While exploring the frelk’s room, the spacer observes:

Marsscapes! Moonscapes! On [the frelk’s] easel was a six-foot canvas showing the sunrise flaring on a crater’s rim! There were . . . pictures of every smooth- faced general in the International Spacer Corps. On the corner of her desk was a pile of those photo magazines about spacers that you can find in most kiosks all over the world. . . . There was a shelf of art books, art history texts. Above them were six feet of cheap paper- covered space operas: Sin on Space Station #12, Rocket Rake, Savage Orbit. (109)

This passage defines the frelk’s utopic desire for spacers and clarifies her stilted exchange with the narrator. The objects that populate her room clarify her vision of spacers; for the frelk, the narrator and other spacers are like comic books or toy soldiers—collectible substitutions or simulacra.52 The passage also weds the frelk’s artistic impulses with her fetish for spacer bodies, extending the consumerist global

52 Cultural theorist Brian Massumi argues that Deleuze and Guattari provide a conception of simulacrum that moves beyond that which Jean Baudrillard and Frederick Jameson discuss in their bleak assessments of postmodernism Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

39 possession of spacers. The narrator describes her room via objects found “in most kiosks all over the world”—if not “everywhere”; she creates idealized sketches of spacers on a “six-foot canvas” that mirrors the proportions and collective depictions within the “six feet of cheap paper-covered space operas.”53 Still, the objects prescribe a vision of spacer identity that only exists in her simulated fantasy—if not “nowhere.”

The pictures and magazine piles contextualize the frelk’s belief that spacers are pure and perfect in their lack of desire; like every other spacer she has encountered, the narrator is a living manifestation of spacer art that happens to speak. In essence, the frelk’s bedroom is another utopia that marginalizes the narrator—even as it reifies and elevates spacer bodies as an unblemished “smooth” artistic ideal. But the narrator’s difference reforms her ideal. Through their failed exchange, the narrator introduces her to the old longing. In response, the frelk eventually rebukes him,

I want something. But . . . you are not the one who will give it to me. . . . Don’t you think you . . . should leave? (110)

With this hesitant question, the frelk’s space is closed to the narrator, but the space is also changed. She now knows that spacers are individuals who possess fragments of their lost desire—a realization that may eventually affect her art. As evidence, she suggests that she will share the story of his difference with her friends: “When you

53 Graham Sleight suggests that these space operas are Delany’s metatextual nod to the “golden age” pulp science fiction that predated the “new wave” in which “Aye, and Gomorrah” participated. Graham Sleight, “Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories by Samuel R. Delany,” Strange Horizons Reviews, December 17, 2007, accessed October 21, 2012, http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/aye-and-gomorrah- and-other-stories-by-samuel-r-delany/.

40 leave, I am going to visit my friends and talk about . . . ah, yes, the beautiful one that got away” (110–11).

The frelk’s experience with the narrator may help her create a more realistic, if not more beautiful, picture of spacers. This spacer is different from the silent, smooth- faced portraits in her spacer magazine collection and on her six-foot canvas. The narrator’s individual desire reforms the frelk’s idealized vision of essentialist spacer identity. Their interaction ends when the frelk rejects the spacer, despite her aspirations to capture his commodified, posthuman difference. Even after the old longing has compelled the spacers to travel through France, the United States, and

Istanbul, it lingers, unfulfilled. But the narrator continues the utopic quest for answers about sexuality and queered identity. The narrative remains open to future adventures with posthuman spacers, as the story concludes without resolving: “And went up.”

The spacers’ unresolved struggle with desire and longing has found expressions in Delany’s more recent texts, as Delany continues to explore queer identity and desire. In the past fifteen years, his longer works—including Phallos

(2004), Dark Reflections (2007), and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

(2012)—provide more explicit discussions of utopic sexuality and desire than he depicts in “Aye, and Gomorrah,” even as these texts explore the possibilities of embodiment and sexual subjectivity. To my mind, Delany’s depictions of queer embodiment in “Aye, and Gomorrah” and in his later novels work to reform public perceptions of difference and to represent the past and future realities of queer identity through a “reparative reading” of heteronormative history.

41 I suggest that “Aye, and Gomorrah” incorporates queer expression in society and in afrofuturist discourse as it grapples with the political implications of commodified posthuman bodies.54 Delany’s representation of queer afrofuturism in

“Aye, and Gomorrah” confronts the interrelationship among race, queer sexualities, and the laboring sexualized body;55 it also answers Mark Dery’s question: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out . . . imagine possible futures?”56 Still, Dery’s query continues to resonate in afrofuturist discourse today, challenging queer afrodiasporic authors such as Delany to share what they imagine for the future and inspiring contemporary readers like me to explore what these futures hold for queer utopia, sexuality, and desire.

54 See Phillip Brian Harper’s discussion of his queer experience in Toronto, Canada, in his essay “‘Take Me Home’: Location, Identity, Transnational Exchange,” Callaloo 23, no. 1 (2000): 461–78. 55 For further developments in posthuman scholarship about race, see Thomas Foster, The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 56 Dery, “Black to the Future,” (180).

42 Chapter 3

IGNITING THE RECOGNITION: RACE AND THE UNDEAD CITY IN

COLSON WHITEHEAD’S ZONE ONE

“I don’t think it’s that novel to recognize the equivalency of cultural forms. The world is a junkyard — take the parts you need to make the machine work the way you want it to. A song, a poem, an essay lives beyond the time of its creation if it can speak to different generations, cultures, contexts. If the recognition is ignited” (Colson Whitehead).

Introducing the Zombie Narrative

In his 2011 Harpers interview “Zone One: Six Questions for Colson

Whitehead,” Colson Whitehead deconstructs the “intellectual imperialism” critics often practice when defining Zone One (2011) as a “literary zombie novel.”57 Walter

Mosely describes Black speculative fiction as representing “a new autonomy created out of a desire to scrap 500 years of intellectual imperialism.”58 But the troubled history between black experiences and intellectual imperialism is difficult to scrap. To this day, black folx are disproportionately targeted as social deviants—with their bodies propped up as cautionary examples of debased humanity. This troubled history often inspires problematic utopic visions that privilege post-racial futures. Even at

57 Noting Zone One’s use of Walter Benjamin’s “Dream Kitsch,” (1925) Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” (1920) and Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” (1990), Keehn suggests that Zone One “tackl[es] head-on the challenge of marrying intellectual and literary substance with pop culture.” Whitehead disagrees. 58 See Walter Mosely’s “Culture Zone; Black to The Future,” published in The New York Times Magazine.

43 their most bleak, afrofuturist texts like Whitehead’s Zone One offer alternatives to these homogenized depictions of tomorrow.

Whitehead challenges Harpers editor to read Zone One and the world as a

“junkyard” of interconnected forms that “can speak to generations, cultures, contexts.”59 Whitehead’s metaphor is an apt one for Zone One. The novel depicts New

York as a socio-spatial assemblage that shapes collective traumatic memory. The novel also explores Black post-human embodiment and afrofuturist possibility through discarded utopic visions and post-apocalyptic space. Zone One shows us that sustainable futures call for adaptive governance that promotes collective action and affirms individual agency at the grassroots level; these futures are not built on optimism or nostalgia; they are built through careful efforts that privilege survival for

Black folx in imagined spaces like Zone One’s Manhattan and that encourage inclusive involvement in real-world spaces like Philadelphia’s increasingly gentrified neighborhoods.

Zone One’s post-apocalyptic New York City is itself a zombie figure that weds post-human embodiment with urban planning and local governance. The text depicts a future in which most surviving humans are relics of a bygone era, save for Mark Spitz, the novel’s Black protagonist. Through remembered flashbacks, the narrative follows

59 In this moment, Whitehead also speaks forward to Reynaldo Anderson’s conception of afrofuturism as “…a hybrid assemblage of…practices and theories arising through a confluence of global influences” (Anderson, 11).

44 Spitz and illustrates his memories of past inequity and his struggles with socially determined mediocrity. Spitz’s memories help him survive—amidst the roving undead who consistently attack his companions and infest New York City’s post-apocalyptic spaces. The text positions memory as an expansive junkyard that fills urban spaces with mountains of salvageable material for (re)constructed connections between traumatized survivors. Spitz and other characters relive their trauma by sharing “last night” stories that mark the final moments preceding the zombie apocalypse; these stories serve as bonding agents that marry acts of memorialization to the undead city and its temporal salvage.

Spitz grapples with recurring memories of pre-apocalyptic New York, as he travels with a team of armed, civilian guerrilla fighters, or “cleaners,” who scour the abandoned city in search of flesh-eating Zombies. Like many Zombie texts, a virus leads to a Zombie infestation that eventually creates Zone One’s apocalyptic setting.

Before the apocalypse, Spitz was an unexceptional New Yorker who worked for an unnamed, nondescript organization. But the apocalypse awakens his talents for adaptation and survival. As Spitz wanders New York, he makes intermittent alliances with bands of human scavengers whose successes and failures teach him strategies for survival.

The United States’ interim governing body, "Phoenix Rising,” eventually recruits him and others as civilian-soldiers. This centralized power is created out of the ashes of a zombie apocalypse in order to mobilize traumatized individuals to fight a common undead—zombie—enemy that stands in the way of nostalgic resurrection of

45 an undead American Dream in an undead New York City. Whitehead chronicles

Spitz’s efforts to rid Manhattan’s zombie-infested streets of the undead with his team of zombie hunting cleaners, dubbed the “Omega Unit.” The cleaners advance a utopic vision of a zombie-free, human friendly reemergence in a barricaded Manhattan. In

Zone One, the life and death of the city is inextricably linked to the life and death of oppressive, entrenched social systems.60 Over the course of the narrative, Spitz’s team revisits familiar storefronts and office buildings to cleanse the city of zombies and support its rebirth.

To Spitz, Phoenix Rising peddles fraudulent hope for nostalgic rebirth and revitalization in a city that has all but adapted to its own zombification. His skepticism acts as a metatextual nod to the zombie genre and to the realities of Black precarity in other horror texts. Critic Carl Joseph Swanson contextualizes Whitehead’s investment in the zombie genre, arguing that Zone One “faithfully” adheres to the “Zombie

Narrative Form” and is shaped by Whitehead’s formative years watching “video store horror flicks” and “horror media” (380).61 Swanson also unpacks Whitehead’s intertextual referencing in the genre. He notes, “Zombie films in particular evince a pattern of generic emulation, relationships of competitive imitation in which one film maker acknowledges her or his influences—in more or less subtle ways—and then does them one better, contributing stylistic effects or formal twists or updated

60 See Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) 61 See Swanson’s “’The Only Metaphor Left’: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Zombie Narrative Form” in Genre (2014)

46 metaphors” (381). These generic interventions act as intertextual “nods,” that include

“quotations, allusions, paraphrases, and iteration that go beyond generic tropes broadly to specific texts and instances of tropes therein” (381).

Whitehead’s “nods” to the “zombie tradition” contextualize his generic interventions. So, too, does Swanson’s assertion that “[a] Zombie narrative’s purpose is not to resolve contradictions but to embody and exteriorize them so they can demolish systems of thought in spectacular fashion” (400). To be sure, Mark Spitz and the narrator consistently forecast these contradictions through narrative “breaches” and paradoxes in Zone One.62 I read these breaches and contradictions as a form of afrofuturist worldbuilding that grapples with racial representation in ways that speak to real-world adaptability for Black folx.

The novel traces Spitz’s “successful adaptation” to life after humanity’s all but final death. It follows Spitz and his Omega Unit as they kill the remaining roving zombies—called Skels—inside the “heart of Zone One,” which is both the site of the first zombie infection and one of the last quarantined human enclaves in the text. By the end of the text, Zone One is over-run by a second wave of formerly benign zombie

“stragglers” whom Spitz and other characters see as harmless, paralyzed zombies that

62 Swanson argues that Zombie narrative form revolves around “soft” and “hard” breaches to established barricades within a given text. For Swanson, soft breaches describe moments when “…a zombie appears in the narrative space without posing an immediate diegetic threat to the characters;” while har breaches reference “…a climactic event in which barricades fail; the narrative space is compromised; and characters are forced to flee, fight, or fall back to another barricade” (396).

47 are frozen in time. In response to this second wave of newly awakened zombies, Spitz abandons his commission as zombie hunter in order to survive. Despite Spitz’s seeming failure, I read him as the novel’s prototype for Black, post-human embodiment: he inverts Nina Auerbach’s claim that each age has the fantastic villain it needs, opining, “A society manufactures the heroes it requires” (Loc 657). Although

Spitz does not see himself as such, he is exactly this hero (Auerbach).63

Whitehead reveals Spitz’s Blackness in the narrative’s latter half, but race is integral to the simultexts that inhere in the novel. Leif Sorensen notes that “[a]lthough zombie narratives are often more concerned with demonstrating the myriad forms of internecine violence that can be stirred up by the presence of the undead, at moments they treat the zombie apocalypse as an occasion for post-racial pedagogy” (Sorensen

572).64 However, Spitz’s memories of upper-middle class Black life and examples of post-human survivability combat this notion. He does not die a violent death at the hands of a faceless, raceless, foot-soldier in the undead army early in the narrative. He may eventually be the last human alive. Yet, the fact that he survives at all—a reality that he addresses in meta-commentary between characters—goes against the history of expendable Black bodies in horror literature and film.65

63 See Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampire, Ourselves (1995) 64 See Sorensen’s “Against the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One” in Contemporary Literature (2014) 65 Although “meta-commentary” often marks a self-aware text, my use here is influenced by Madelyn Jablan’s description of “Black-meta-fiction” which she argues is always already steeped in inter-textual, political, and racial meaning (Jablan 27).

48 This chapter’s first section, “The Paradox of a Middling Post-human

Embodiment,” positions Mark Spitz as a Black post-human everyman whose ostensible mediocrity challenges racist social systems and expectations that demand

“equal performance” from Black folx who have fewer economic resources and fewer points of societal support.66 While Jessica Hurley reads Zone One as “[a] kind of meta- passing novel” that “buries [Spitz’s] blackness exactly where we can’t see it: right there on the surface” (321), this section presents Mark Spitz as a Black bricoleur who grapples with and adapts to the coded realities that render him visible in a post- apocalyptic society that “manufactures the hero it requires” (Loc 657).67

This chapter’s second section, “Living Memory in Urban Black Space” explores the ways Zone One constructs “[t]he city as [a] ghostship” (Loc 87) in which humanity rehearses futurist nostalgia. New York is a synecdoche for “displaced spatial stor[ies],” where trauma is memorialized and repurposed through New York’s undead

“arteries.” I position humanity’s impulse for “pheenie” optimism and utopic revitalization in relationship to the manufactured, capitalist histories of plentitude and progress that support speculative development in the text. I also read Mark Spitz’s

66 For an example of how this plays out in educational and larger social environments, see recent reports such as Edbuilds “23 Billion” and the Pew Center’s study on Race in America (2019) 67Jessica Hurley argues that “Like the generic Zombie, Mark Spitz is originally black before being resurfaced as white and then revealed to have been black all along; his surface, like the zombie’s, betrays both a history of whitening, of post-racialization, and the failure of that history successfully to banish race from the visible surface” (321).

49 contrasting, decentralized map of New York as an alternative approach to humanity’s survival in the wake of a zombie apocalypse that kills the city and centers his racialized, post-human future.

In the final section, “The Future(s) of Post-Apocalyptic Urban Imagination,” I extend Zone One’s discussion of Black embodiment, memory, and urban spaces to engage anthropologist Elanor Finley’s conception of “New Municipal Movements.” I argue that the novel’s “Phoenix Rising” movement recreates an ineffective centralized bureaucratic system that suppresses an “empowering politics” of grassroots solidarity.

Mining this strategic suppression for potential lessons, I turn to afrofuturist urban planning as an avenue for participatory political action that challenges systemic violence against Black bodies and reimagines how we conceive of our localities. It is no secret that this violence takes many forms—gentrification, housing insecurity, and inadequate city services, to name just a few—and that Black folx are among the most vulnerable.

The Paradox of a Middling Black Post-human Body

Mark Spitz holds a precarious position as the novel’s voice of reason, despite the prevalence of violent, hyper-masculine narratives that hide the complexities of black male visibility, and garner “attention and praise from the dominant culture”

(hooks 66).68 Spitz is violent; passivity would make him an easy target for the

68 See bell hooks’ We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004)

50 zombies that populate New York’s post-apocalyptic streets. Still, he lacks the scars that undergird other literary narratives of Black embodiment in twentieth Century

African American literature.69 The narrator often describes Spitz via his intellectual performance instead of for his physical attributes:

His aptitude lay in the well-executed middle, never shining, never failing, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life’s next random obstacle (Loc 137).

Rather than read this passage as a lukewarm depiction of Black intellectual mediocrity, I suggest that the narrator strategically undersells Spitz’s capabilities here, in the same way a working musician might understate her ear for the polychordal structures of human experience or a graduate student might underplay her ability to adapt to the epistemological potholes that pepper her route to a PhD. In Zone One, this

“next random obstacle” just happens to be the potential annihilation of human civilization via a zombie apocalypse.

While scholars such as Leif Sorensen, Gerry Canavan, Mark McGurl, Marina

Warner, and Tina Pippin acknowledge the “zombie imaginary” as historically racialized, Jessica Hurley situates race as a continually haunting presence, or “ghost,” in Zombie narratives—including Zone One. She argues that,

the zombie’s Haitian origins and founding connections to slavery are simultaneously acknowledged and consigned to an irrelevant past in a critical narrative that writes the blackness of the Zombie as distant both temporally— back then—and geographically—over there—from contemporary American

69 See Carol Henderson’s Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (2002)

51 culture, occluding the ways the zombie functions as a racialized figure in the present (312).

Her analysis counters efforts to render zombies as post-racial and to affirm neo-liberal biopower.70 Bridging the relationship between past and present anti-Black textualities, she argues that “the contemporary zombie encodes both the desire for a post-black future and the nightmare that haunts the postracial dream: a nightmare of the past come to life, intransigently present, and hungry” (313). While I agree with Hurley’s general assessment of the racialized zombie figure in Zone One, I argue that the narrator positions Spitz as an anti-exceptional hero figure, whose complex identity belies a literary history of shrewd adaptability that racializes post-human possibility.

Hurley reads Zone One as “[a] kind of meta-passing novel” that connects Mark

Spitz’s assumed surface identity with the “history of whitening,” and “the history of the Zombie in American popular culture” (321-322). But I offer an alternative reading of Mark Spitz’s racialized post-human presence in the novel. Zone One’s narrator notes:

Beauty could not thrive, and awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. Only in the middle was there safety. [Mark Spitz] was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. (Loc. 2293)

70 See Jessica Hurley use of “biopower” in her essay “History is What Bites: Race, Zombies, and the Limits of Biopower in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One” (2015). She extends Michel Foucault’s conception of the concept which describes the many ways states use various approaches to subjugate and control their citizen’s bodies.

52 In this passage, the narrator presents a contradiction that complicates the relationship between the living, the dead, and the undead. Mark Spitz comes into his own as a post- apocalyptic everyman as U.S society dies and is re-animated as an undead reflection of its former self. Spitz is rendered immortal as a figure whose life advances through preternatural adaptability and manages to survive when others eventually die. If

Spitz’s human surface belies essentialist post-racialism, as Hurley suggests, his post- human depth is encoded with racial meaning and possibility—especially if we read

Zone One’s apocalypse as one of the many apocalypses Black folx continue to navigate and survive post-slavery.71

Post-human Possibility and Anti-exceptionalism

Spitz consistently devalues feelings and intuition; he speaks of calculation and code, internalizing the developing relationships between careful observation and post- apocalyptic survival. As the narrator intimates, Spitz “kept his eyes open and watched his environment for cues, a survivalist even at a tender age. There was a code in every action and he tuned in” (Loc 132). In refuting what he calls “pheenie optimism”—or the nostalgic impulse to return to pre-apocalyptic civilization—he distances himself from the old “dead” humanity and the zombie figures that encourage survivors to reach backward, beyond the post-apocalypse. The narrator shares:

71 See Gerald Horne’s The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean (2018).

53 Mark Spitz believed he had successfully banished thoughts of the future. He wasn’t like the rest of them, the other sweepers, the soldiers up the island, or those haggard clans in the camps and caves, all far-flung remnants behind barricades, wherever people struggled and waited for victory or oblivion…This is what he had learned: If you weren’t concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you wouldn’t survive them…All that pheenie bullshit had clouded his mind (loc. 386).

Spitz’s calculations keep him alive and work as a blueprint for the new everyman.

Zone One’s apocalypse—expressed almost exclusively in remembered flashbacks and crumbling cityscapes—is a catalyst for Spitz’s post-human transformation. If, as Spitz muses, nostalgia or desire for the old human existence is “a contagion in its own right,” he has developed post-human resistance; he critiques the “artifice” and

“counterfeit empathy” that helped him survive the capitalistic bureaucratic systems before the apocalypse (loc. 2330). While these social codes provided Spitz with the tools to develop opportunity-based communalism over “counterfeit empathy” in the old world, they “clouded his mind” in a post-apocalyptic world in which survival requires a different code of conduct.

The active zombie skels and their dormant, straggler counterparts contribute to this evolved code of post-human conduct in Zone One. The undead figures act both as the embodied result and ultimate end of humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire for post-industrial capitalist utopia; they are the mindless antithesis of Spitz’s calculating

Black post-human identity. They also represent the unsavory impulses that most humans attempt to hide. The narrator notes:

It was the business of the plague to reveal our family members, friends, and neighbors as the creatures they had always been. And what had the plague exposed him to be? Mark Spitz endured as the race was killed off one by one.

54 A part of him thrived on the end of the world. How else to explain it: He had a knack for apocalypse. The plague touched them all, blood contact or no. The secret murders, dormant rapists, and latent fascist were now free to express their ruthless natures (Loc. 3097). Interestingly, the text blurs the line between humans and zombies in this moment. The

“ruthlessness” of the cleaners’ meticulous sweep of the city and the zombies’ perpetual search for flesh are rendered as equivalent actions as both groups travel through the cityscape. In many cases, there is little difference between familiar human movement and foreign zombie shuffle. In their attempts to distinguish themselves from the foreignness of zombification, cleaners eventually mirror the zombie’s violent actions and movements through New York’s spaces. This aligns particularly well with

Michel de Certeau’s description of moving bodies in which he suggests that “[t]he opacity of the body in movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what indefinitely organizes a here in relation to an abroad, a ‘familiarity’ in relation to a

‘foreignness’” (de Certeau 130).72 Connecting de Certeau’s description to Zone One, I read the similarity between cleaner and Delany’s spacer movements as an implicit comparison between familiar pre-apocalyptic humans who ruthlessly pursue capitalist utopia and foreign post-apocalyptic zombies who ruthless pursue flesh.

Whitehead’s language often belies the mechanical efficiency with which Spitz studies the overlapping familiarity and foreignness of New York’s abandoned spaces.

He juxtaposes this reality of abandonment with the ghosts of a past city that exist

72 See Michel de Certeau’s Arts de Faire (1984).

55 before the apocalypse, sharing: “millions of people tended to [the city], they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving the mechanism of the metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious story, and idea by unlikely idea” (Whitehead 5). Here,

“stories” speak to physical construction within the booming metropolis and to narrative composition within the city’s layered living spaces. Both demand collective vision and “tending,” even after the apocalypse. In fact, the narrative suggests that the animating “ideas” of growth continue to build and sustain the city in its undead state— through memories and anthropomorphized connection with the “mechanism of the metropolis.”

Spitz’s memories help contextualize the relationship between a dying humanity and an undead city, offering a framework for connecting individual ideation to collective imaginative labor. Spitz reads cities as unifying, energy-focusing tools that channel collective vision in their ferocious development and expansion, much like the zombies whose presence unites isolated groups after the apocalypse. The narrator shares:

Manhattan was a template for other feral cities and Mark Spitz was a sort of template, too, he’d figured out…There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all. Even if they didn’t know it (loc. 1349 – 1361).

Mark Spitz’s flashbacks of the city offer a template for the living memories that flesh out Manhattan’s envisioned return through the paradox of collective isolation; Spitz’s flashbacks also foreground the realities of urban decay and “post-apocalypse stress disorder” (PASD) in the novel.

56 Living Memory in the Urban Post-Apocalypse

“It is in the acceptance of responsibility and accountability, often worked through memory and the recovery of the past, that we bring the past into a living relation with the present and may thus begin to lay the foundations for utopian change” (Baccolini 119).

Utopian critic Raffaella Baccolini explores connections between memory, utopic visions, and the narrative impact they each have in science fiction texts; she argues that “memory has always been and is still profoundly associated with identity”

(130).73 Baccolini’s construction of memory is crucial for understanding the relationship between humanity’s pre-apocalyptic past and Mark Spitz’s post-human future in Zone One. We see this in Spitz’s flashbacks to pre-apocalyptic Manhattan, which the narrator frames through Spitz’s childhood recollections of the formative cityscape:

[Mark Spitz’s] family posed on the museum steps or beneath the brilliant marquee with the poster screaming over their left shoulders, always the same composition. The boy stood in the middle, his parents’ hands dead on his shoulders, year after year (Loc 45).

I read Spitz’s parents’ “dead hands” in relationship to the tableau of show titles and implied collection of museum-worthy artifacts in this passage; his parent’s hands act as temporal touchpoints for nostalgic rumination; they also foreshadow humanity’s eventual end. Spitz remembers this historical placemaking as a yearly ritual that holds simultextual significance for similar retrospective place-making in the narrative, as he

73 See Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan’s Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003)

57 and other survivors navigate the hollowed-out remainder of New York’s urban environment. Memories map “displaced spatial stor[ies]” through a “linguistic system that distributes places” in service of a static vision of inevitable growth and rebirth in the text (de Certeau 130). We see this in the “pheenie optimism” and nostalgic memorialization that inspire hopeful humans to breathe life into the collapsed lungs of an undead metropolis—just as we see this in Spitz’s early ruminations about the experiential “composition” of pre-apocalyptic time in the novel.

Zone One invites readers to examine the city itself as an un-dead relic that complicates Mark Spitz’s conception of space-time and propels his epistemological awakening as the text’s heroic Black “everyman.” The narrator suggests, “the city itself was as bewitched by the past as the little creatures who skittered on its back. The city refused to let them go: How else to explain the holdout establishments on block after block, in sentimental pockets across the grid?” (Loc. 3487). New York’s

“sentimental pockets” contain traumatic fragments that impair Spitz’s decision- making in the text, even as they act as sites of utopic myth-making for the text’s

“pheenie optimists” who wish to re-map and “revitalize” the undead city as it was before the apocalypse. Mark Spitz critiques this utopic myth-making and the

“rectilinear logic” that supports a gentrified, re-mapped New York City—which contrasts the afrofuturist urban planning practices I outline in this chapter’s final section.

58 Peddling the Re-mapped Metropolis

Mark Spitz depicts the city as humanity’s rotting symbiont, against which he and other denizens measure their significance and orient their re-membered identities.

Spitz’s description of New York illustrates how gridded streets are shaped by, and shape, the modern human experience:

The truths of the grid’s rectilinear logic, its consequences, of how people moved and lived inside boundaries, had already been applied to cities across the country through the decades, anywhere human desire and activity needed to be tamed and made compliant (Loc 522).

We see versions of “rectilinear logic” expressed through colonizing narratives that maintain perineal divestment and marginalization in Black spaces. Using Spitz’s description as a foundation, I understand rectilinear logic as a mode of reasoning that advances exploitative capitalistic progress and growth through oppressive, racist, socio-geographic strictures; these strictures often work to hinder worldbuilding practices for Black folx in ways that advance generational wealth for white folx— from ground-level urban renewal, to cranes in the sky. Clear examples persist in the lingering physical and economic realities that stem from redlining in cities across the country. Redlining worked to “tame” Black folx desire for integrative socioeconomic development and advancement through forced rectilinear adherence to color-coded maps.

59 This racist logic hampered mobility and political agency by creating socioeconomic “boundaries” that continue to affect Black communities today.74 New

York City’s Seneca Village provides a clear example of a racist rectilinear logic that ignores class affiliation. The city government leveled the middle-class Black neighborhood to make room for New York’s utopic Central Park.75 Philadelphia’s

“Black Bottom,” a formerly lower-middle class neighborhood, was also leveled in a government-supported “urban renewal” effort that created what is now “University

City.”76 This neighborhood is home to two long-term urban planning and development projects that seek to create a technology hub built around “meds and eds”—with over two billion dollars of projected investments in 2020 alone.77 To be sure, Zone One

74 See John Schlichtman, Jason Patch, and Marc Lamont Hill’s Gentrifier (2017). Also see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit (2019) which explores the relationship between the Federal Housing Authority, socioeconomic mobility, and discriminatory community-building practices. Taylor examines racist real-estate and homeownership schemes in cities like Philadelphia which underwent fundamental demographic changes during the great migration. Taylor uses this history to contextualize current urban development practices during her appearance on Jacobin’s The Dig (2020) 75 See Columbia University’s The Seneca Villa Project and Vox’s “The lost neighborhood under New York's Central” Park” (2020) 76 See John Puckett’s digital exhibit “Collateral Damage in Unit 3” which explores the University of Pennsylvania’s historical role in destroying The Black bottom—and it’s current efforts to memorialize it’s history. Also see the “University City District,” the district’s most recent annual report, The State of University City 2020, and the city of Philadelphia Planning Commission’s future vision for the “University Southwest District” in the commission’s broader “Philadelphia 2035 Citywide Vision.” 77 There a plans to build both projects using billions of dollars in private and public sector investments over the next 30 years. The first project “UCity Square” envisions a place where “entrepreneurs and experts [can] connect, collaborate and challenge one another” in ways that help “stimulate economic development and community

60 outlines an urban planning approach that reifies gentrification and supports rectilinear logic that we see in real-world cityscapes like Philadelphia. But there are better ways to imagine urban spaces through reparative historical recovery and inclusive planning practices that respond to that history.

Claudio Saunt highlights the possibilities for reparative historical recovery in

“Mapping Space, Power, and Social Life.”78 He foregrounds the problematic ways geographic information systems map “legal fictions and other elements of colonial geography” in order to highlight the need for “a new cartographic symbology that is ambiguous and multivalent” (Saunt 148). Indeed, Zone One’s narrator hints at the inherent “consequences” of “rectilinear logic” in explaining the progression of intellectual zombification that happens over time and space within gridded city streets, and Spitz is a party to this process.

Spitz’s historicization of pre-apocalyptic New York provides a sense of multivalence to the city’s well-hewn, if precipitously decaying spaces. The narrator recalls:

[Spitz] remembered how things used to be, the customs of the skyline. Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another’s shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term after term (Loc 74).

investment.” But racial and gender disparities in hiring practices for technology workers may make “community investment” rather lopsided. The second project, 30th Street District, establishes “community, connectivity, and identity” as their goals, but lacks considerations for affordability and inclusive access in their gridded vision. 78 See Claudio Saunt’s “Mapping Space, Power, and Life” in Social Text (2015)

61 In this passage, we see a past vision of New York that shapes Spitz’s childhood and determines his orientation to his family, who live throughout the city. Spitz’s vision overlays images of his uncle, Lloyd, lounging in Manhattan with his mother and father taking photos before a Midtown show. Spitz’s also reads Zone One’s pre-apocalyptic

New York as a corporeal, anthropomorphized junkyard of diverse living structures— bounded within a gridded, social network of arterial streets and subway stations.

The tenuous connection between arterial grids and social networks works in tandem with Spitz’s running commentary on the commodification of memory in technologically mediated spaces. He seems to retrospectively support his parents’ refusal to upload their memories in an ever-expanding networked cloud:

[Spitz] parents were holdouts in an age of digital multiplicity, raking the soil in lonesome areas of resistance: a coffee machine that didn’t tell time, dictionaries made out of paper, a camera that only took pictures. The family camera did not transmit their coordinates to an orbiting satellite (Loc 41).

The concept of digital multiplicity is particularly interesting when contrasted with the narrator’s description of physical buildings and spaces before the apocalypse. In many ways, Spitz’s parents actively avoid these spaces in order to maintain connections with single-use, physical tools. One might read Spitz’s fascination with New York’s architecture as an extension of this relationship with physicality and objects that occupy “real world” spaces. But the narrative troubles this relationship; physical objects—including the dormant zombie bodies that populate the tenements and skyscrapers—are in the process of transformation.

62 While transformed and transforming zombies begin to move through and map the city, uninfected humans realize that they are grossly outnumbered. Still, the novel’s “pheenie optimists” support the “Rising Phoenix’s mission” of urban renewal by holding out hope for a newly gentrified space through which they can share their vision of the re-mapped metropolis. Rising Phoenix codifies this hope through strategic planning meetings held among the city’s repurposed spaces with low-ranking

“pheenie” leadership. The narrator explains:

Corporal Brent of the U.S Army Corps, for his part, conducted his daily planning sessions at a noodle house, addressing his men and women from behind the counter as if serving up strands of udon instead of baroque strategies of city planning (or, more accurately, reconfiguration). The officers spread out, homesteading. Manhattan was empty except for soldiers and legions of the damned, Mark Spitz noted, and already gentrification had resumed (loc 426).

This passage is layered with simultextual significance. On the surface, we see a familiar assumption of martial law in a time of crisis. The U.S Army Corps designs and oversees the day-to-day social and municipal service operations. But the narrator gestures toward physical counter-texts that trouble this reading. While “daily planning sessions” advance a utopic vision of organized development and progress via the troupe of gentrifying “cleaners,” the narrator points out gentrification’s tenacious revival in a city filled with undead and uncritical “homesteading” occupants.

Both gentrification and homesteading speak to historical relationships between race and land/property ownership in the U.S. Land claims made through the

Homestead Acts aided westward expansion into what Abraham Lincoln called “[t]he wild lands of the country,” which he argued “should be distributed so that every man

63 should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition.” 79 Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from this “distributed” territory while many “freed” and enslaved Black folx were actively barred from claiming the ostensibly “public” land. With this context in mind, the proposed post-apocalyptic expansion and planned homesteading in Zone One speaks to a racialized history of power and privilege that is peddled below the narrative’s surface. It also speaks to a collective trauma of forced relocation and systemic disenfranchisement that made planned space possible in real- world U.S history.

Instead of more equitable and adaptive attempts to learn from past mistakes,

Zone One’s “pheenie optimists” continue to rehearse collective trauma amidst the urban decay. Indeed, “Mark Spitz glimpsed something of the new city they had been sent to build” on top of spatial histories, through landgrabs and gentrification (loc.

696). But the gentrifying map ultimately falls apart due to newly awakened hordes of dormant zombie stragglers. In the novel’s final moments, Spitz embraces a new city map that accounts for humanity’s second fall from grace. As before, this means the end of utopia, even as it signals the beginnings of a new afrofuturist urbanity.

The Future(s) of Post-Apocalyptic Urban Imagination

“Now I want to see the art and work being connected actively—consciously—with the political work and the activism I see happening on a grassroots level to address the

79 See Francis Browne’s The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln (1886) and Paul Frymer’s Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (2019)

64 same oppressive systems we’ve been facing for centuries. We’re on a merry-go-round; all of these so-called renaissances emerge—from Harlem to present—and get suppressed. For me, I want more out of my futurism. I want more.” (Topia 40) In a roundtable table discussion about the past “25 Years of Afrofuturism and

Black Speculative Thought,” Sheree Renée Thomas reflects on afrofuturism’s intellectual genealogy to assess its usefulness today. She makes a distinction between afrofuturism as a concept and afrofuturism as a movement in order to present a “way forward” that’s “rooted in our own creativity and values” as Black folx,.80 Although afrofuturism takes shape as a codified concept after Dery coins the term in 1994, its ideological roots reach back generations. We see these roots in the hopeful imaginative work Isiah Lavender traces in “the literary prehistory” of afrofuturism;81 we also see these roots in P. Gabrielle Foreman’s “histotextual” readings of Black women’s literary and cultural interventions that shape “as yet determined futures” in the 19th century.82 Today, these same roots nourish artistic expression that weds imagination-work and politics-work to advance political, social, and spiritual justice— both now and in the future.

80 It’s important to note that Thomas writes a piece explicitly for the roundtable, titled: “25 years in a 400-Year-Long-Song.” In this piece, she connects the legacy of colonialism and slavery to the “erasure” of Black history and the “external forces” of white supremacy that “…reclaim, rename, reappropriate the culture and the intellectual labor we give birth to.” (40) 81 See Isiah Lavender’s Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (2019) 82 See Gabrielle Foreman’s Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (2009)

65 Sheree Renée Thomas’s invocation of recurring historical futures resonates with Mark Spitz’s reading of nostalgic post-apocalyptic imagination. Thomas recalls the “merry-go-round” of “so-called renaissances” that belie a closed loop of emergence and suppression. She ultimately calls for an afrofuturist vision that breaks the loop of destruction and revitalization—a vision that establishes a new present and demands “more” of the future. For Spitz, this afrofuturist vision manifests in his post- human relationship to codifiable urban spaces. As the United States’ “Rising Phoenix” campaign crumbles in Zone One’s post-apocalyptic reality, Spitz understands that “the world wasn’t ending, it had ended and [humans] were in the new place” (Loc 4052).

Thomas does not mention Whitehead’s text in her retrospective evaluation of afrofuturism. Still, she calls us to imagine and enact an alternative politic that works to dismantle “the same oppressive systems we’ve been facing for centuries”—systems that Spitz questions in his critique of “Rising Phoenix.” (40) Spitz engages with

Thomas’s challenge through an embodied politic that weds the imagination-work of post-apocalyptic survival and politics-work of embodying anti-nostalgic post-human agency. In this chapter’s concluding section, I build on Zone One’s critique of “Rising

Phoenix’s” community-building practices and point to examples of grassroots afrofuturist urban planning practices that help shape change through inclusive municipalism.

66 Afrofuturist Urban Planning

Afrofuturist urban planning requires dialogic imagination and communal participation. But what might this approach look like in living, real-world urban environments where “rectilinear logic” flattens imagination and “tames” sustainable afrofuturist activity? So far, this chapter has examined Mark Spitz’s presence and positionality in relationship to a fictional, undead New York City. I have connected

Spitz’s post-human embodiment to his racial identity and explored how living memory can challenge and advance efforts to remap post-apocalyptic urban space. I have also unpacked Zone One’s depiction of bureaucratic centralized governance through the text’s critique of “Rising Phoenix.”

In Roar Magazine’s sixth issue The City Rises (2017), anthropologist Eleanor

Finley argues that urban spaces offer radical potential for inclusive governance through “municipalism”—an approach to grassroots political participation that works against top-down control of local communities from disconnected state actors who

“deprive us of our own humanity and sense of purpose” (17).83 Municipalism’s localization of “humanity” and “purpose” is crucial in our present moment, as it offers an alternative to nationalist narratives which work to usurp political futures from local stakeholders who “play meaningful roles in our lives and communities.” (17) Finley suggests that, “[m]unicipalities, towns, villages, city wards and neighborhoods provide

83 See Elanor Finley’s “The New Municipal Movements” in Roar Magazine’s The City Rises (2017)

67 the actual physical scale at which such an empowering politics can flourish.” She also notes that “[h]istorically, cities have drawn people together, facilitating diversity by encouraging cross-cultural interaction…[that] infuses cities with a humanistic sensibility—and by extension also with radical potential” (17).

Finley’s focus on human-scaled local governance provides an actionable foundation for radical intervention in urban space. Her conception of municipalism works against capitalistic codification of land and resources that incentivize private conglomeration at the expense of Black futures. The alternative disempowering relationship to municipal growth and development fuels gentrification and encourages depersonalized management of intrinsically personal needs—such as space, shelter, and communal connection—for Black folx. We see countless examples of this depersonalized growth in Philadelphia’s gentrified, formerly Black neighborhoods like

“Graduate Hospital,” and “University City.” The same holds true in Philadelphia’s “up and coming” neighborhoods like “Point Breeze” and “Francisville.”

Philadelphia’s Francisville neighborhood is home to the “Black Quantum

Futurism Collective” which “explor[es] the intersections of futurism, creative media,

DIY-aesthetics and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens.”84 (Blackquantumfuturism) In addition to creating art that expands the disruptive potential of Black futurity, they focus on the political implications of usurped time and space by supporting Black folx through the dislocating exigencies of

84 See Rasheeda Phillips’ and Camae Ayewa’s Black Quantum Futurism

68 imminent domain and government-funded gentrification in Philadelphia’s changing spaces. Rasheeda Phillips, the collective’s co-founder, also works as a Senior

Advocate Resources & Training Attorney for poverty law, which allows her to use her imaginative labor in collaboration with artist like Moor Mother and other community collectives like PHL Assembled in service of the political goal of “building a future free from poverty and racism.”85

Philadelphia’s Citizen Planning Institute also helps build supportive futures for

Black folx in urban spaces by offering a grassroots-focused “education and outreach arm of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission,” which invites denizens to learn about and help shape restorative practices in their communities and neighborhoods.86

This includes group and individual visioning sessions that decentralize the urban planning process through discussions of zoning, community assets, coalition building, and generative storytelling. It also culminates in a capstone project that outlines plans for participatory action in local communities. Similar initiatives exist in Boston’s

Citizen Planner Training Collaborative and Baltimore’s Citizens Planning and

Housing Association.

Citizen planning groups do not always examine the more granular concerns of capitalist extraction through racist housing policies, regressive tax structures, and privatized “public” education. Although these are not explicit concerns in Zone One’s

85 See The Shriver Center for Poverty Law, PHL Assembled, and Community Legal Services of Philadelphia 86 See Philadelphia’s Citizen Planning Institute

69 imagined New York City, they are foundational considerations for Black survival in real-world cityscapes. They are also integral to afrofuturist urban planning and engaged, agency-affirming citizenship in technologically mediated public communities. In the next chapter, I explore the concept of digital citizenship and its relationship to education, in order to foreground afrofuturist pedagogical practices that support communal participation in planning and shaping public digital spaces.

70 Chapter 4

A LASTING TRUTH: OCTAVIA E. BUTLER’S AFROFUTURIST

PEDAGOGY AND DIGITAL LEARNING PRAXIS

“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.” (Octavia E. Butler)

Introducing Afrofuturist Pedagogy

In this dissertation’s introductory chapter, “Afrofuturism, Utopia, and

Imagination,” I situate critical imagination in relationship to subversive Black futures that grapple with the past. In this chapter, I extend that discussion to teaching and learning spaces and educational (in)justice. Educational injustice is a reality for many folx of color, whether or not we have the time, energy, socioeconomic capital, or material conditions to manage the physical and psychic toll of persistent outrage and critical engagement.87

This bleak depiction is not meant to downplay or erase the strides toward educational justice that have saved countless lives inside and outside of classroom spaces. On the contrary, it’s meant to underscore the necessity of critical imagination, a tool that bell hooks describes as “one of the most powerful modes of resistance that

87 Critical engagement and outrage refer specifically to educational injustice in this instance, though they generally implicate antagonistic sociopolitical and economic systems in the U.S. See Sarah Knopp and Jeff Bale’s Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (2012)

71 oppressed and exploited folks can do and use.”88 Critical imagination yields educational justice by making room for a form of worldbuilding that offers students and educators of color a chance to shape current and future pedagogical practices.

Octavia Butler uses critical imagination as a mode of resistance in her work, and its pedagogical power continues to grow—yielding lessons and spreading seeds of emergent change—in response to the palimpsests of educational praxis. In their collaborative introduction, “Palimpsests in the Life and work of Octavia E. Butler,”

Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamison build on M. Jacqui Alexander’s conception of palimpsestic time to describe the overlapping temporal relationship between real- world and imagined realities that Butler creates in her afrofuturist writings.89 Bailey and Jamison reference past and present violence against Black bodies as examples of historical palimpsests, suggesting that in our everyday lives, “[t]ime is like a palimpsest, with the past bleeding through and informing the present, never singular, but written over and forever leaking and seeping beyond borders, in a constitutive manner.”90 They extend this concept to collections of memories, using the term palimpsestic memorialization to describe “the process of taking these memories and putting them in a new contextual here and now to further explore the significance of

88 See hooks’ Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (2009). 89 See Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson’s “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Palimpsests in the Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler” (2017). Also see Jamieson’s contribution to TED education series “Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?” (2019) 90 See Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005)

72 that there and then.” Palimpsestic memorialization is particularly useful in increasingly (re)segregated educational spaces that suppress class and race-based counter-narratives in pursuit of homogenized, product-oriented, educational visions for students.

By expanding palimpsestic time to include memorialized experiences in Butler’s work, Bailey and Jamison leave room for readers to explore the interconnected patterns of life-writing, science fiction, and historical recovery in Butler’s visions of the future. In this chapter, I add another thread to the pattern by positioning Butler—a foundational figure in afrofuturism—within an understudied area of afrofuturism. To my mind, Butler is a subversive educator who uses palimpsestic memorialization to practice imaginative, afrofuturist pedagogy. Through her life and work, Butler 1) assesses the learning needs of an intelligent, hierarchical, species; 2) develops a body of speculative case studies that situate those needs in broader imaginative contexts; and 3) uses her gift of afrofuturist storytelling as a strategy for delivering lessons that continue to speak to the complex realities of life and learning for Black folx.

Afrofuturist pedagogy is a part of Octavia Butler’s legacy; it describes this chapter’s efforts to develop teaching and learning that affirm, nurture, and mutualize the critical

Black imaginary—via intentional educational worldbuilding.

As we adapt to and imagine the future of teaching and learning, it’s important to ground educational institutions and the public knowledge networks they support in

73 what Paulo Freire calls the “pedagogy of possibility.”91 Afrofuturism invites us to reconsider what’s possible in teaching and learning by offering an imaginatively capacious approach to thinking about, talking about, and creating inclusive, networked educational spaces. It also affirms the importance of marginalized realities and stories as we wade through the kipple of undemocratic, “disruptive innovation” which is disproportionately created, funded, and distributed by heteronormative, white males who envision themselves as humanity’s preeminent worldbuilders.92

In Chapter 3, I explored democratic participation and imaginative worldbuilding in physical spaces through the layered lenses of Black post-human embodiment, afrofuturist urban planning, and municipalist participatory action. This chapter thickens the discussion of space and participatory action through afrofuturist pedagogy. Afrofuturist pedagogy offers an approach to imaginative worldbuilding that democratizes time and space for people of color; this pedagogical approach centers sidelined counter-narratives of future-focused learning and interrogates the gap between formal and informal, extra-physical digital learning spaces. Octavia Butler’s work presents educator-scholars and students with ways to imagine afrofuturist pedagogy in the digital classroom and beyond. I see these pedagogical spaces as

91 See Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2004) 92 For references to kipple see Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Seo-Young Chu’s Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep (2011). For references to heteronormative, white male worldbuilding, see hook’s Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994).

74 potential good places and no places in which co-learners can grapple with democratic participation and palimpsestic memorialization in our digitally connected world.

I embrace Butler’s legacy and the concept of palimpsestic memorialization by engaging with multimodal texts, (hi)stories, and mixed-methods research to construct a theoretical and experiential framework for afrofuturist pedagogy. Building on Sarah

Otterson’s reading of Butler’s “Pedagogical Philosophy,” Marc Lamont Hill’s discussion of “digital counterpublics,” bell hooks’ meditations on “critical thinking,” and Netrice Gaskins’ afrofuturist framing of “techno-vernacular creativity,” I consider the ways afrofuturist pedagogy centers racial identity and queer community within digital studies to support a radical Black digital praxis in instructional spaces. At base, my approach represents a process of becoming through “emergent strategy”—which adrienne maree brown describes as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated world we long for” (24).93

This chapter models the process of becoming and shaping change both in substance and form. It’s built around three interconnected sections—each with an introductory essential question, targeted close readings of a primary text, and two attendant subsections. The questions serve as entry points into the frames of inquiry that inform afrofuturist praxis; they’re not veiled, or unrealized assertions; they’re meant to provoke reflective practice and further dialogue. Ultimately, this chapter is

93 See Adrienne Marie Brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)

75 designed to increase accessibility in each section for pedagogical transparency and purposeful scaffolding—including in the accompanying soundscape that thickens this chapter’s pedagogical worldbuilding through sonic space.

The first section, “Minding the Gap,” explores the ways online and hybrid

“extra-physical” classroom spaces affect how students of color generate and share ideas with one another and with a broader digital public. I read Octavia Butler’s “The

Book of Martha” as a metatext about utopic teaching and learning in extra-physical space. This section speaks to evolving discussions about inclusive, democratic, educational spaces. It also explores the challenges of democratic participation in digital counterpublic in terms of contested digital citizenship.

The second section, “Space Making and Queer(ing) Community,” expands the discussion of sociopolitical space by probing issues associated with “safe” and “open” spaces for queer students of color. I look to Butler’s Fledgling as a text that narrates a process of queer space-making from the perspective of an amnesiac subject who learns to create mutualistic community as she embraces her embodied post-human queerness.

This section explores the ways afrofuturist pedagogy affirms queer visions of teaching and learning that work in dialogue with past and present discussions of critical pedagogy. I address heteronormative approaches to space-creation that limit how we envision and realize our utopian impulses in critical learning. This section also affirms experiential diversity which helps students and educator-scholars cultivate an inclusive pedagogical praxis.

76 The third and final section, “Afrofuturism Online,” explores the philosophical and practical aspects of an afrofuturist framework for pedagogical change by building on Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change and Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown’s transformative social-justice text. I wed social constructivist readings of experiential diversity with a critical examination of “techno-vernacular creativity,” to propose a digital “intervention” that offers practicable, afrofuturist instructional design in the digital classroom.94 Afrofuturist pedagogy emerges as “the place where philosophy and practice meet”—a place that is critical of “best-practices,” that draws strength from its liminality, and that makes room for an imaginative palimpsest of teaching and learning.95 This section offers examples of afrofuturist instructional design that support students and educator-scholars of color in “reading” and “shaping” digital spaces, while engaging in pedagogical worldbuilding.

Minding the Gap: Placemaking, Digital Citizenship, and Class(room) Participation

“Think of the needs of the future, Martha, as well as the needs of the present.” (198)

Essential Question: How do we realize inclusive teaching and learning in a sociopolitical system that incentivizes short-term investments in measurable outcomes

94 For explorations of social constructivism, see Raymond D. Boisvert’s John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time (1999). For a contextualized definition of techno-vernacular creativity, see Netrice Gaskin’s “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography in Augmented Space” (2016). 95 See Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel’s collaborative essay “Hybridity pt. 3: What does Hybrid Pedagogy Do?” in which they challenge the practice of making hard and fast distinctions between digital and physical learning spaces—arguing that “all learning is necessarily hybrid.”

77 when those investments continue to undervalue participants who are perennially excluded from long-term returns and securities in that system?

In Butler’s short story, “The Book of Martha,” Martha Bes, a Black novelist, is given a clear mandate from a “seductive, child-like, very dangerous being” to imagine one change that will re-shape humanity for the better, as the species tap-dances at the precipice of self-extinction. In a Socratic dialogue with a shape-shifting deity, over the course of the narrative, Martha learns to think critically about her concept of human nature, her vision of an ideal future, and her perception of consequential change. The story takes place in an extra-physical dream-like space that exists outside of time. This space shifts to accommodate Martha’s growth and self-perception as she interacts with the deity, whom she constructs as “God.”

Given Butler’s self-identification as “a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive,” I read “The Book of Martha” as a snapshot of speculative life-writing that allows Butler to write herself, and other complex Black folx, into a vison of critical utopia through participatory, inquiry-based, learning with God.96 “The Book of Martha” implicates the deep histories of socioeconomic disenfranchisement that inflect Black educational attainment and complicate the “freedom” of democratic participation in social and

96 See Gary Canavan’s Octavia Butler, an addition to the single-author driven “Modern Masters of Science Fiction Series” (2016). Also see Teresa Coffman’s Inquiry-Based Learning: Designing Instruction to Promote Higher Level Thinking (2017). For foundational aspects of the approach, see The Marxist Internet Archive’s The Collected Works or L. S Vygotsky.

78 political spaces. The short story also establishes pedagogical connections between

Martha, God, and the layered histories that shape Black womanhood.

The story’s narrative and Martha’s lesson begin with a radical assertion sandwiched between two questions: “‘It’s difficult, isn’t it?’ God said with a weary smile. ‘You’re truly free for the first time. What could be more difficult than that?’”

(189). Here, God’s “weary smile” hints at the palimpsestic history of sexism, segregation, and slavery, traced through “Activist Sentiments” in nineteenth-century

Black women’s writing and compounded in twenty first century “Abolitionist

Tools;”97 Martha’s vision of freedom reifies the “difficult” divide between restrictive sociocultural marginalization and pedagogical agency—especially as she reflects on her new positionality and power at the beginning of the narrative. This truth is born out in the deity’s all-knowing axiom “[y]ou see what your life has prepared you to see” (191). With these words, Martha begins an educational process that helps her shape change both for herself and for humanity’s survival.

At the start of Martha and God’s conversation, God demands, “[y]ou will help humankind to survive the greedy, murderous, wasteful adolescence. Help it to find less destructive, more peaceful, sustainable ways to live” (192). Providing a bit of context for this imperative, God explains that humans are “well on the way to destroying billions of themselves by greatly changing the ability of the earth to sustain them”

97 See P. Gabrielle Foreman’s Activist Sentiments: Reading Black women in the Nineteenth Century (2009). Also see Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019).

79 (193). The resonances with current broad-based environmental and social justice concerns of 2020 are clear in this prescient passage—particularly as talks of The

Green New Deal and apocalyptic climate change pervade our present collective consciousness.98

“The Book of Martha” also pays clear-minded attention to the realities of human self-interest; as God shares the cost(s) of Martha’s task to shape humanity’s future: “[w]hen you’ve finished your work, you’ll go back and live among them again as one of their lowliest…whatever you decide is to be the bottom level of society, the lowest class or caste or race, that’s what you’ll be” (193). Here, God challenges the unsustainable ethos of rugged individualism by incentivizing mutualistic accountability in Martha’s decision-making. She is not able to enrich herself at the expense of others, given God’s stipulation; she must consider the whole of humanity in order to secure a livable position for herself in her imagined future.

Martha’s response to her future fate provides an example of palimpsestic memorialization from the perspective of a systemically disadvantaged Black subject.

She notes, “I was born poor, Black, and female to a fourteen-year-old mother who could barely read. We were homeless half the time while I was growing up…I was born on the bottom, but I didn’t stay there. I didn’t leave my mother there, either. And

98 See the US house of Representative’s proposed “The Green New Deal”. Also see “Meet the Policy architect behind the Green New Deal” (2019) A podcast episode of The Ezra Klein Show in which Rhiana Gunn-Wright discusses the purpose and imagined policy framework that drives the plan. Also see a later conversation on the same podcast with Varshini Prakash titled “Generation Climate Change” (2019)

80 I’m not going back there!” (193-194). But Martha is chosen precisely because of her experiences with systemic inequality and power asymmetry, as God explains. By its end, the short story suggests that the “bottom” can look much different when change is shaped by a marginalized woman of color like Martha Bes.

Martha’s extra-physical space is an example of imaginative educational placemaking that reflects the possibility of positive socioeconomic change for those

“born on the bottom.” The shifting space also suggests that a timeless entity and a time-strapped species are both capable of change. Martha reconciles the realities and experiences of her past with the future she builds in the extra-physical space. I read the extra-physical space as a responsive classroom that’s actively shaped by her individualized experiential learning process.

Martha learns a salient lesson early in the narrative: she has the agency to create her environment and shape God. This requires her to consider her perception of power in relationship to her experiences as a Black woman. Reading Martha’s narrative through an afrofuturist pedagogical lens helps place her learning process in dialogue with that of other students of color who must adapt to the liminal spaces of digital “classrooms.” In fact, I interpret Martha’s time with God as a type of immersive virtual experience, in which she learns to adapt to an educational environment by coding/shaping the contours of its representation—all while working with a patient, curious, and insistent facilitator. God speaks to Martha as an educator might to a reluctant student:

You’re free to ask me questions…You’re free to argue and think and

81 investigate all of human history for ideas and warnings. You’re free to take all the time you need to do these things. As I said earlier, you’re truly free. You’re even free to be terrified. But I assure you, you will do this work (194).

On the surface, this passage presents a paradox; God seems to command Martha to imagine species-saving change, all while affirming that she is “truly free.”

Nonetheless, God’s invitation to question, “argue, and think and investigate all of human history for ideas and warnings” illustrates the deity’s commitment to Martha’s agency as a learner. To my mind, God “assures” Martha that she will work to save humanity’s future because of her experiences at “the bottom” of society and the potential consequences of leaving the task to another, more privileged and less empathetic, individual.

Martha’s work is difficult, but it is ultimately possible because she takes responsibility to address the problems that face humanity and she exercises agency by imagining a utopic solution. I connect Martha’s mutable extra-physical, imaginative learning space with real-world extra-physical, digital spaces in which mutability and agency are not a given for students of color. Both constructions of extra-physical space invite educator-scholars to revise assumptions about temporality—analog— linearity, and the process(es) of becoming that shape pedagogical methods.

Connecting Martha and real-world students of color helps educator-scholars raise questions about how we grapple with the material and structural differences that underpin access, participation, and becoming in mutable extra-physical learning spaces. This move to connect Martha’s fantastic space and real-world digital spaces helps educator-scholars support palimpsestic memorialization, collaborative

82 knowledge-building, and democratic participation for students of color across extra- physical, “digital divides.”

Scholars and media practitioners deploy the term “the digital divide” to describe the different ways people use or shy away from technology, including class and race-based separation between groups who have access to and adopt technological systems.99 Recent contributions to the conversation, such as John Horrigan’s “Digital

Readiness Gaps,” focus on access and technical requirements when grappling with digital knowledge. Horrigan’s study positions users along a continuum of

“preparedness” and openness to engaging with digital tools.100 Overall, his study describes digital readiness in three ways: 1) Digital Skills, or the abilities/knowledge necessary to navigate the web, share content, and create content online, 2) Trust, which is a person’s belief in their ability to ascertain the credibility of information online to ensure that their personal information is safe, and 3) Use, which describes the extent to which people utilize online tools to perform everyday online tasks.101 All three of these considerations have direct connections to practical aspects of

99 For a more granular look at conversations surrounding digital literacy, the digital divide and technological engagement in learning, see: Tory Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner’s “No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait” (2013), “Truthy Lies and Surreal Truths: A Plea for Critical Digital Literacies” (2016), and the recent Pew Study “Americans and Digital Knowledge” (2019) 100 See John Horrigan’s “Digital Readiness Gaps” (2016) funded by the Pew Research Center. 101 For a fascinating examination of how the capitalist ethos has shaped the reality of “everyday online tasks” see Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants. (2017)

83 participating in digital spaces. When critically incorporated into pedagogical praxis, they can empower digital citizens to shape socio-political debate—especially when that debate excludes and tokenizes Black folx in adherence to what Ruha Benjamin describes as “The New Jim Code.”

In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin explores the realities of technologically encoded racism that share simultextual relationships with Michelle

Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) and Carol Anderson’s White Rage (2016).

Benjamin provides a useful framework for thinking through the trappings of “coded inequity” and digital gatekeeping that, like other aspects of white assimilationist culture, commodifies Blackness while, simultaneously, “seeing” it as an abject—and, ostensibly, objectifiable—difference. Referencing students’ rejection of a “Facebook designed online program” in Brooklyn, Benjamin notes that coded inequity “can be met with collective defiance, with resisting the allure of (depersonalized) personalization and asserting, in this case, the sociality of learning.”102 The depersonalized, profit-driven, simulacrum of learning is a concern for many educator- scholars and leaners; it is even more of a concern when we consider race, which

Benjamin describes as a “kind of tool” that is “designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice as part of the architecture of everyday life.”

102 In addition to Benjamin’s work on the “sociality of learning” in digital spaces, see Amy Collier and Chris Friends, /podcast conversation on “Questioning Learning” for HybridPod.

84 Benjamin encourages us to question technology and think critically about the veiled goals that commodify Blackness and reify digital whitewashing as an encoded practice that shapes the future.103 Benjamin’s framing has important implications for the digital divide because it underscores the literacy and participation gaps that aggravate this divide. Benjamin’s framing also resonates with Martha and God’s effort to shape a future in which humanity is less inclined to “spend their waking hours trying to dominate or destroy one another” via racist erasures that seek to recode palimpsestic memorialization and flatten the Black imaginary.

I read Benjamin’s efforts to deconstruct and resist The New Jim Code as a rallying cry for Black folx who seek to revolt against the technologically mediated

“dead zone of the imagination” that can occur in divided physical and extra-physical pedagogical spaces.104 Henry Giroux’s vison of imagination as a transformative place and practice further contextualizes Martha’s exploratory learning process in her extra- physical discursive space. It also makes room for “a practice of freedom” which amplifies “cultures, and traditions that give students a sense of history, identity, place, and possibility.”105 While “The Book of Martha” realizes freedom through humanity’s necessary change and survival, Giroux frames freedom in terms of a “gap” that

103 I offer a narrative example of this skepticism in Chapter 3, when discussing Mark’s Spitz’s parents’ aversion to digital multiplicity and uploading photographic memories into the cloud. 104 See Henry Giroux’s interview with Victoria Harper: “Henry A Giroux: Neoliberalism, Democracy and the University as Public Sphere” (2014) 105 See Henry Giroux’s “The Disappearance of Public Intellectuals” (2012)

85 separates academic spaces from “real-world” communities and digital placemaking practices.

Placemaking and Process

Technology’s presence in knowledge-building often requires educator-scholars to rethink student engagement and the network of experiences that connect and divide students within digital spaces. George Siemens introduced the term “connectivism” over a decade ago to account for the shifts in networked, digital learning. The theory has become increasingly useful for inquiries into the epistemological underpinnings of educational praxis, as it accounts for the presence of chaos and complexity in digital learning spaces. He argues that “[l]earning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual.”106 In highlighting the potential unpredictability of networked learning spaces, Siemens puts his finger on what has become an ongoing discussion of placemaking practices in digital education. We see a version of these nebulous,

“shifting core elements” over the course of Martha’s learning process as she shapes

106 Siemens original essay, “Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age” continues to influence conversation about digital learning including critical engagement with Web 3.0. For a recent example, see Abbas Foroughi’s “The Theory of Connectivism: Can It Explain and Guide Learning in the Digital Age?” (2015). There’s room still for sustained discussions of race and marginalized identities in digital spaces.

86 the contours of her extra-physical learning environment in response to her evolving conversation with God.

After God grants her world-shaping powers, Martha starts to change her extra- physical space by creating “blue sky with a few clouds” under which she begins

“walking through what could have been a vast city park” alongside her all-powerful guide (195). Her chosen locale informs this first space-creation exercise. She does not create a crowded café or busy street, nor does she conjure a cavernous lecture hall or cloistered classroom. Her initial choice shapes the pedagogical environment in which she interacts with God and provides metatextual commentary on traditional built learning environments. Martha’s vision of a living, green, open environment contrasts closed approaches to placemaking in online and hybrid learning spaces. These closed approaches often privilege depersonalized best-practices and fixed-goal interaction over responsive community-building and participatory development.107

Jesse Stommel expands the discussions of placemaking in digital learning by questioning the “default” representation of learning space, arguing that “letting the default configuration of a classroom dictate how we’ll teach is to allow the bureaucratic (and in this case architectural) trappings of schooling subsume our

107 See Michael Morris’s “Saying no to Best Practices” in which he maintains that “Digital tools, strategies, and best practices are a red herring in digital learning.” I connect Morris’s argument here with Benjamin’s conception of race and technology to understand how best-practices can flatten our diverse human experiences in digital spaces.

87 pedagogies.”108 This “default configuration” hints at the gap between imaginative participation and fixed-goal interaction both in “The Book of Martha” and in digital learning spaces. Here, Martha’s shifting extra-physical space speaks to adaptive personalized, learning that acknowledges past experiences—as we see when God instructs Martha to think about “Jonah, Job, and Noah” to “remember them” and to

“think about their stories” (191). Martha’s space also leaves room for serendipity, as

God revels in the “lovely sensation” of “anticipating without knowing” (202).

Amy Collier and Sean Michael Morris further complicate fixed-goal interaction by challenging educators to closely examine “best practices,” “learning outcomes,” and “rubrics” which propagate a depersonalized, systems-thinking approach to education.109 They argue that this approach dehumanizes and flattens learning environments and privileges static/standardized measurements of learning— often to the detriment of diverse, non-traditional, online, and hybrid learners. This depersonalized approach also overlooks structural and conceptual roadblocks some students of color face in digital learning spaces, despite the relief the approach can

108 For further discussion of “default” learning spaces, See Jesse Strommel and Sean Michael Morris’s co-edited collection of essays: The Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (2018) 109 Jonah, Job, and Noah’s stories reference God’s past systems-thinking approach to educating humanity. God learns from these stories and asks Martha to do the same.

88 create for educator-scholars whose precarious work often includes teaching many courses with many students.110

Exclusionary conceptual roadblocks present generative challenges in Martha’s learning process. But this is not surprising when readers consider her presence and positionality in relationship to other biblical figures, including Job, Noah, and Jonah.

God asks Martha to recall their parables as she imagines ways to save humanity’s future. The first two figures, Job and Noah, were intertextually constructed as rigid patriarchs who followed a strict epistemology of obedience and subservience, to God’s delight. Both were willing to make untold sacrifices, including watching their families die and witnessing much of the earth’s population drown in a global genocide. The last biblical figure, Jonah, was dragged through his existential lesson without any modicum of agency. Like these figures, Martha acts as humanity’s ontological emissary. But she also benefits from one-on-one interactions with a reformed deity whose pedagogical approach has shifted from that of a dominating sage on a cosmic stage to an interdependent guide who walks and works by her side.

Butler’s work explores what interdependence looks like in a variety of imagined spaces, from interspecies symbiotic relationships in Dawn (1987) to persistent “hyper-empathy” in Parable of the Sower (1993). In addition to continuing

110 It’s important to acknowledge graduate student, adjunct, lecturer and “contingent” faculty’s labor. These roles occupy an increasing percentage of space in higher education, without the protection of tenure or, in many instances, the guarantee of life- sustaining healthcare. They are also underrepresented in faculty governing bodies.

89 this work, the shift from dominance to interdependent worldbuilding in the “The Book of Martha” aligns with M. Jacqui Alexander’s sacred pedagogy in Pedagogies of

Crossing (2005). Alexander grapples with the ways space, time, and identity intersect and give shape to a disruptive ethos of interdependent teaching and learning, in the text. Her construction of teaching as worldbuilding helps contextualize Martha’s positionality in the story. Alexander notes:

I have deliberately chosen to interrupt inherited boundaries of geography, nation, episteme, and identity that distort vision so that they can be replaced with frameworks and modes of being that enable an understanding of the dialectics of history, enough to assist in navigating the terms of learning and the fundamentally pedagogic imperative at its heart: the imperative of making the world in which we live intelligible to ourselves and to each other—in other words, teaching ourselves (6).

Building on this imperative of intelligibility and accessibility, Alexander argues for the importance of “reciprocal investments” that enable a “metaphysics of interdependence.” We see the dangers of distortive hierarchy and individualism in

“The Book of Martha.” Martha works to interrupt humanity’s distorted vision by learning from the “dialectics of history” that shape her sociocultural identity as a

Black woman.

Martha makes her marginalized perspective intelligible to readers as she discusses the corrupting influences of power, historical privilege, and market-driven injustices with God. Alexander argues that this pedagogical approach to teaching for justice is “at odds with a hegemonic narrative that would foreground in a one-sided manner an ascendant corporate class as the sole agents of history” (92). Afrofuturist pedagogy builds on this approach by encouraging educator-scholars to challenge an

90 exclusionary corporate “code of ethics” which leads to “one-sided,” market-driven, digital instructional spaces and which flattens justice-driven visions of dialectical history.

Martha’s example invites educator-scholars to examine how market-driven language and methodologies keep marginalized students of color from being agents of history and from becoming agents of the future. Her choice to make decisions for the good of humanity rather than for the good of market capitalization aligns with

Mohanty’s vision of a political pedagogy that centers justice-driven teaching and learning. Indeed, Giroux argues that pedagogy is inherently political and should— therefore—involve, support, and critique political processes, including democracy. He also suggests that neoliberal capitalist impulses to privatize public goods and devalue social services undermine education as a guaranteed right of the welfare state. These impulses support increasingly precarious pedagogical spaces that exacerbate historical racial injustices.

Democracy and Digital Pedagogical Engagement

I read Mohanty’s critique of corporate practices in education and Ruha

Benjamin’s assessment of “The New Jim Code” as indictments against the “apostles of neoliberal,” which Giroux suggests are “using schools, think tanks, foundations, and media to produce subjectivities, identities, and values that mimic market-driven values and social relations.” Unlike prevailing utopic visons of disruptive education

91 technology in the U.S, Giroux and others focus on the negative ramifications of technological exceptionalism. He suggests that:

One consequence is the emergence of what the late Tony Judt called an ‘eviscerated society’—one that is stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in” any viable democracy (qtd. in Eagleton 78). This grim reality has been called a ‘failed sociality’—a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy (Honneth 188). It is also part of a politics that strips the social relations of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice that acts directly upon conditions that bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary (Giroux).

Giroux’s vision of Judt’s “failed” and “eviscerated” society connects with a growing populist strain in US political discourse, as citizens question the exploitative capitalist ethos that marked the nation’s founding and continues to drive its public policy. Judt’s concepts also speak to socioeconomic redlining that continues to negatively affect communities of color, from lowering property tax-based education funding to perpetuating environmental racism. We see palimpsestic echoes of this ethos in the steady assimilation of vulnerable educational and civic structures by business interests and multinational actors—in service of the rectilinear logic that I explore in Chapter 3.

Butler explores the dystopic results of the drive for competition and hierarchy in the “The Book of Martha,” in interviews, and in her other speculative work. She also offers avenues for resistance and change. Martha’s approach to solving humanity’s existential crisis involves acknowledging the ultimate ends of this sociopolitical system and countering dominant groups that would perpetuate unsustainable hierarchies and irresponsible growth. When God gives Martha the

92 option to pass her challenge to another, more willing individual, she takes a moment to think about,

people who would be happy to wipe out whole segments of the population whom they hated and feared, or people who would set up vast tyrannies that forced everyone into a single mold, no matter how much suffering that created. And what about those who would treat the work as fun—as nothing more than a good-guys versus bad-guys computer game, and damn the consequences. There were people like that. Martha knew people like that (201).

Butler’s words are tragically prescient. Not only because we’ve ceded political control to the types of people Martha describes, from the US commander-in-chief to social media CEOs, but because we consistently allow the “vast tyrannies” of market-driven determinism to depress pedagogical imagination and privilege profit strategies.111 As

Giroux notes, many classrooms force students into a “technically trained docility,” that robs them of self-reflective capacities while measuring their value in terms of employability and human capital—at all costs.112 Butler’s words confirm the need for considerable and consistently contextualized self-critique, particularly in learning spaces. Martha performs this self-critique by questioning God’s physical embodiment

111 See Alexis Madrigal’s article “What Facebook Did to American Democracy; And Why it Was so Hard to see it Coming” (2017). Also see Yochai Benkler, Naomi Oreskes, Paul Starr and Jane Mayers’s discussion of our asymmetric media ecosystem in “A Modern History of the Disinformation Age: Communication, Technology, and Democracy in Transition” (2019). 112 See Giroux’s conversation with Simon Dawes about Giroux’s monograph: Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (2014) Describing this occurrence as “economic Darwinism” Henry Giroux argues that the lack of ethical, intellectual, oversight “removes economics and markets from the discourse of social obligations and social costs.” Initiative such as OECD’s Futures Thinking exercise and accompanying resource database titled “Schooling for Tomorrow.”

93 and power. She and God eventually share a meal, after she fully realizes her power to construct and operate a virtual counterpublic that encourages imaginative responses to humanity’s existential challenge.

Marc Lamont Hill addresses the problem of systemic inequity and the impact of capitalist ethos on social discourse in his vision of digital counterpublics, arguing that “[t]he formation of digital counterpublics is occasioned not only by the contingencies of technological innovation and the efficiencies of global technoscapes, but also the overdetermining impact of neoliberal capitalism” (289). For him, Black

Twitter offers a compelling example of this vision that fosters a community of historically disenfranchised agents who work to challenge the systems that have invested so little in sociopolitical, economic, and existential freedom for Black folx.

This comes along with an acknowledgement that:

[a]s practices of efficiency, austerity, deregulation, privatization, and “free” trade become the governing logics of both the public and private sector, traditional (i.e., physical) spaces of counter-public (and public) engagement, such as bookstores, restaurants, and coffee houses, are being eliminated or radically reconstituted (289).

Along with the effects these market-driven sociopolitical policies have on the bookstores, restaurants, and coffee houses that give physical shape to—and provide established inflection points for—the public sphere, these practices can also affirm the need for extra-physical pedagogical spaces that foster digital counter-public

94 engagement and explore methods of subversive resistance for Black folx and other people of color.113

Like Martha, it’s often hard for students of color to embrace resistance and the challenges of change. Likewise, students of color often have difficulties realizing online and hybrid classrooms as potential counter-public spaces for resistance, when public participation in technological modes of dissent have lasting negative consequences in their educational and professional lives. Technologically mediated resistance can expose students to a host of policing and harassment that butts up against the limits of privacy; but social media also empowers students to take hold of a means of control that’s often utilized by an increasingly corporatized, carceral state.

As Hill notes, “some of the same technologies of surveillance used to criminalize

Blackness are being repurposed by Black citizens, particularly Black youth, to resist the criminalizing techniques of State power” (290). We see the realities of this resistance in activist sentiments that are expressed through social media movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and other symbolic forces that affirm agency and digital worldbuilding in a patriarchal society founded on the “old habits” of racism, heteronormativity, and sexism that Martha works to change.114

113 See Rob Larson’s Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley (2020). Larson explores Amazon’s “disruption” and eventual dominance in the online retail and cloud infrastructure markets, in relationship to tax incentives and “relentless” anticompetitive practices that fund their business model. 114 Martha eventually shapes God as the mirror of herself after coming to terms with her internalized racism. She admits “I…though I had already broken out of the mental

95 It’s important that educator-scholars grapple with the limits of technologically mediated “safe-spaces” in the pedagogical counterpublics they create for learners of color—just as it is crucial for Martha to grapple with the limited extra-physical safe space she shapes. But it’s also important for students to have agency, clarity, and accountability in shaping the rules of engagement as Martha does with God—before her idea is “made public.”115 Tressie McMillan Cottom suggests regulating public exposure by distinguishing between learning artifacts that are available to the general public and pedagogical interactions that are open only to students and educator- scholars.116 I describe this strategic access as critically translucent counter-public engagement that limits overexposure for students who are attempting to process difficult, often radical ideas and realities in synchronous time. In this instance, digital

cage I was born and raised in—a human God, a white God, a male God…” (209). She only realizes humanity’s future after relinquishing this destructive fantasy, which God describe as “an old habit.” I read this in relationship to Butler’s Dawn in which she describes humanity’s competing drives of intelligence and hierarchy—the latter of which she describes as “the older and more entrenched characteristic”—or habit—in the text. For further research on digital activism, see The Pew Research Center’s study “Activism in the Social Media Age” (2018). 115 I provide examples in this chapter’s final section “Afrofuturism Online” 116 See Tressie Macmillan Cottom’s talk on “Digital Sociologies” at Virginia Commonwealth University. Also see Andrea Wenzel’s “Curious Communities: Online Engagement meets Old-School, Face-to-Face Outreach” (2017). For an example of what a “curious communities” project might look like, see Germantown Infohub, hosted on Medium. Medium provides a socially connected digital content management platform that is also a popular space for US public policy conversations. Described as a “free resource to share information and stories of and for residents of the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia.” Germantown Infohub is a collaboration between a community advisory group, students and faculty at Temple and Jefferson Universities”—including Wenzel and Hill.

96 translucence entails opening curated, peer-reviewed artifacts to the public that can be contextualized with accessible course content. This gives students agency over which portions of their creation process and versions of their results are shared. Their resulting artifacts are also carefully realized, having undergone an iterative process that resonates with Martha’s ongoing exchanges—or workshops—with God.

After workshopping a range of possible changes, including minor tweaks to humanity’s free will and changes to human reproduction, Martha eventually settles on using “powerful, unavoidable, realistic dreams that come every time people sleep”

(203). For her, this individualized approach provides humanity with its best chance of living through its dangerous adolescence. She rationalizes “I think if people go to a...well, a private heaven every night, it might take the edge off their willingness to spend their waking hours trying to dominate or destroy one another” (204).

Exemplifying a drafting and revision process, Martha continues to craft her solution by including a stipulation that “dreams teach—or at least promote—more thoughtfulness when people are awake, promote more concern for real consequences”

(211). She eventually suggests an imaginative experiential space in which all dreamers can explore their interests, and learn through their mistakes, while maintaining a sense of individual agency that leads to collective change. In other words, Martha realizes the transformative potential of afrofuturist pedagogy. It’s tempting to read this as a disengaged solution. But I understand Martha’s solution as a nod to individual engagement with utopia that does not demand homogeneity and that can be both open and decentralized.

97 “The Book of Martha’s” afrofuturist pedagogical extra-physical space is born of difference; it is at once connectivist and deconstructive; it offers a decentralized vision of experiential learning that challenges learning environments that rely on meticulously calculated metrics and blank-slate pupils; and it shows us the benefits of critical inquiry while inviting us to deconstruct and reform the building blocks of our epistemic existence on this planet. At base, Butler’s short story takes an imaginative approach to the chaos of learning and being. It also contributes to evolving discussions of online learning and representative placemaking without explicitly referencing digital space. This approach continues in Butler’s final novel, Fledgling, which explores a Black vampire’s queer-embodied approach to learning. Massaging the connective tissue I’ve established between Martha’s imagined extra-physical space and real-world digital learning spaces, I position Fledgling’s Black vampire figure in relationship to online learners and the mutualistic, embodied, queer learning spaces they create with educator-scholars.

Space Making and Queer Pedagogical Community

“We either weave ourselves a family of symbionts, or we die.” (Butler, 270)

Essential Question: How can we foster mutualistic teaching and learning communities that support queer voices and hybrid pedagogical embodiment in digital spaces?

Butler’s efforts to resituate the vampire figure in her final published novel,

Fledgling (2005), resonate with her earlier efforts to examine the human in “The Book of Martha,” the alien, in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy (1987 - 1989) and Doro’s

98 “Wildseed” descendants in the Patternist series (1976 - 1984). Fledgling continues

Butler’s practice of grappling with race, gender, and power via an intelligent, adaptable, and strong-willed, female protagonist named Shori. We learn that Shori is a

53-year-old queer, dark-skinned, human/vampire interracial “child,” who counters depictions of white, heteronormative, colonialist vampire figures. In the novel, Shori and other vampires—known as Ina—privilege mutualistic symbiosis over imperialist vampirism.117 But Shori must learn this through careful community building, because she has lost her memory and—with it—her understanding of her queer, Black, post- humanity.

Shori’s Blackness inflects her process of experiential learning throughout the novel and provides readers with a first-person account of the reflective self-making that inheres in this process. In fact, the novel’s first sentence positions readers in perceptual Black space. Shori narrates: “I awoke to darkness” (1). Without introduction, we find the main protagonist, badly injured, amnesiac, and blind in a nondescript cave. She explains,

I was hungry--starving!--and I was in pain. There was nothing in my world but hunger and pain, no other people, no other time, no other feelings…The hunger was a violent twisting inside of me. I curled my empty, wounded body tightly, knees against my chest, and whimpering in pain (1).

117 Indeed, Ruth Salvaggio notes that “Butler [often] places her heroines in worlds filled with racial and sexual obstacles, forcing her characters to survive and eventually overcome these societal barriers to their independence (79).

99 In this abrupt and visceral entry, Shori articulates the genesis of her learning process and the undergirding discomfort that shapes her interactions with an unfamiliar world.

The darkness does not shroud her pain in this passage; nor does it hide the persistent scars left from a forgotten history of unspeakable violence and loss; on the contrary, our entry into the narrative puts her body into stark focus—even as memory loss prevents her from identifying her surroundings.118 Her ability to survive the bodily trauma of fire, gunshots, and sunlight hints at the utopian potential in her queer, Black, post-human “hybridity” and in what Toni Morrison describes as a process of “re- memory.”

Much of Shori’s disruptive, re-membered, difference can be attributed to her interspecies “hybridity”—a term Ali Brox uses to describe the fluid bio-social construction that influences Shori’s “mixed-race” heritage. Brox argues that Fledgling

“provides a vampiric vision where fixed categories and boundaries are challenged.”119

Over a decade after the novel’s original publication, Butler’s efforts to “write herself into” the pale, sparkling whiteness of vampire lore also highlights the pedagogical potential of communal placemaking for queer, post-human people of color— particularly in exclusionary and hostile learning environments.

118 Raffaella Baccolini argues that “memory has always been and is still profoundly associated with identity.” 119 See Ali Brox’s “Every age has the Vampire it needs.” (2008)

100 In many ways, Fledgling is a Bildungsroman that begins with a teachable moment, after an attack that kills her family and leaves Shori blinded and in darkness.

But Shori heals as quickly as she learns. The darkness and hunger that drive Shori to seek community beyond the novel’s opening scene eventually fuel her desire to adapt to her hybrid identity and grow. Throughout the novel, Shori works to survive successive attacks from conservative Ina who attempt to thwart her self-discovery process. These attacks push her to build a mutualistic community who protect her and help her embrace her queer, Black, post-human body.

Unlike the vampire figures that John William Polidori, Bram Stoker, Anne

Rice, and others distill from transcultural folklore, Butler’s long-lived, pale-skinned

Ina are neither undead nor universally malevolent—despite the Ina elders who try to erase Shori’s difference. As Shori notes, the Ina race most likely “evolved right here on Earth alongside humanity as a cousin species like the chimpanzee” (67). Their preternatural vitality results from an evolutionary path that privileges longevity over reproductive efficiency and “symbiosis” over “vampirism.”

In the mutualistic symbiosis between Ina and humans, Ina get the pleasure of biting humans and drinking their blood while human “symbionts” get the assurance of health and longevity through Ina saliva. Shori learns this lesson of mutuality and resource sharing early in the narrative through her relationship with Wright, her first human male symbiont. She subsequently builds a mutualistic community with other female and male symbionts who teach her about her humanity and protect her from the bigoted Ina who fear the transformative potential of her difference.

101 By constructing Ina and humans as companion species, Butler separates the Ina from the predominant “undead human” trope and connects them with her other work, which focuses on complex mutualistic relationships. This separation from traditional vampire narratives is clearest in Shori’s lineage because of her experimental combination of Ina and human DNA. Before Shori encounters her father, Iosif, who fully explains her unique positionality within Human and Ina communities, she intuits,

I think I’m an experiment. I think I can withstand the sun better than…others of my kind. I burn but I don’t burn as fast as they do. It’s like an allergy we all have to the sun. I don’t know who the experimenters are though, the ones who made me Black (31, ellipses Butler’s).

The ellipses in this passage serve a rhetorical purpose. They illustrate a self-conscious hesitation to transgress the internal boundaries between a familiarized self that Shori, until this point, associates with Black womanhood and an alienated self that she associates with Ina; the ellipses also present a typographical enactment of the repetition of “I” phrases in the passage; she “thinks” but is not completely sure what— let alone who—she is; but she is certain of her difference. Over the course of the narrative, she is unable to fully identify with either “race” because of her scientifically manufactured hybridity and the resulting “dismantling of the Western construction of dualisms of self and other” that Patricia Melzer traces in Butler’s other works. As a result, the narrative grapples with “a contradictory notion of self that undermines the binary and…[creates] an alternative way to view difference…as an essential part of the self” (67).

102 Working in relationship to Melzer’s reading of embodiment in Butler’s earlier works, Fledgling builds a case for Shori’s agency and perspective as a female protagonist who must learn to harness the power of her hybrid body/mind.120 This is an apocalyptic concept for many Ina who build and foster communities based on assumed evolutionary and cultural superiority. In response, the Ina council— representing the most prominent Ina families in North America—come together at the end of the novel to debate Shori’s claims to her Ina heritage. Some elder Ina consider the utopic potential in Shori’s hybrid body: “Child do you understand your uniqueness, your great value?” (220) while others see only the threat of change and potential biological difference: “What will she give us all? Fur? Tails?” (306). The internal disagreements between Ina families and the many challenges to Shori’s right to self-determination illustrate a dangerous division between progressive and conservative Ina. These disagreements also evidence the disruptive reality of Black embodiment and the threat that Blackness poses to the Ina’s utopic enclaves—even as

Shori’s presence serves to advance the adaptability and survival of both the human and

Ina races.

120 For a reading of Shori’s hybridity in relationship to alternative feminist power structures see Dorisa Costello’s “Female Vampires as Embodied Critiques of Heteronormativity, Blood-Mixing, and Patriarchy: From Carmilla to Fledgling” (2019). This chapter works in relationship to other example of “embodied difference” in the larger edited collection in which it appears. See Jamie A. Thomas’s and Christina Jackson’s Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies and Public Discourse (2019)

103 The complexities of Shori’s identity and memory loss intersect at key, constitutive, teachable moments throughout Fledgling. These moments illustrate the difficulty of embodying change in systems that are built to encourage stasis and conformity. We see this in interactions between Shori and her symbionts after a group of Ina elders kill Isof in a failed attempt to take Shori’s life. During one of her most trying times in the novel, she invites Iosif’s orphaned symbionts to join her community. Instead of reifying the safe power structures that incite Ina elders to violence, she opts to pose questions and address these new community members as equals. Shori exclaims to the newly accepted symbionts “I hate my ignorance. I need to learn from you since there are no adult Ina to ask” (123). She doesn’t overlook the educational potential in her symbiotic bonds with humans or reify the imbalance that older, more conservative Ina have created in their symbiotic relationships with humans. She turns to her symbionts for guidance through change, recalling the definition of mutualism she learns from her father before his death.

Shori’s mutualistic practices model a “pedagogical philosophy” that Sarah

Otterson examines throughout Butler’s works. Otterson suggests that “[f]rom

Patternmaster to Fledgling… Butler envisions a seeming utopia whose hidden stagnation is suddenly ripped open by the violence of change” (433). Shori’s reception among the oldest, proudest, and most respected Ina speaks to this relationship between violence and change. Some Ina attempt to eradicate Shori’s entire bloodline, in a

104 violent erasure of her generative difference.121 They reject and conspire to silence her counternarrative—as an “ill-formed” discourse; they also debase and dehumanize her with hauntingly familiar insults, like “dirty little nigger-bitch.” But her openness to a challenging process of experiential learning and intentional re-remembering provides her with tools to contextualize and confront these violent responses.

Shori’s orientation toward openness and curiosity shapes the community- building work in which she engages throughout the novel with her human symbionts who help her see teaching and learning as a critical utopian project that is at once individualized and collectivist. Her experiences with community-building in Fledgling provide practicable examples for educator-scholars who wish to foster transformative teaching and learning communities with students in digital, afrofuturist, pedagogical spaces. Shori’s narrative also highlights the dangers of utopian enclaves that demand homogeneity and support destructive commitments to closure.

The Utopian Project and Education

In her 2013 PAMLA address on the future of education, Shelly Streeby builds on Fredrick Jameson’s construction of the “utopia as enclave” to situate Butler’s work within a discourse of utopian placemaking and learning. In the address, Streeby points to Butler’s time as both teacher and student at the Clarion Workshop. She also

121 Otterson explores Butler’s use of the “other” as a transgressive device and observes that violence is often a necessary step toward utopic change in Butler’s texts.

105 connects Butler’s impulse to deconstruct intentional community-building with

Jameson’s depiction of “totalizing” utopia. Streeby addresses the problematic relationship between utopia and educational place-making, noting that, like Butler,

“Jameson also thinks about the spatial and systemic dimensions of utopian form: its manifestations in revolutionary political practice, intentional communities, buildings, and ‘attempts to project new spatial totalities’ such as the city itself.” Digging deeper into the spatial dimensions of utopian longing, Streeby suggests that:

[s]taging this distinction spatially, he understands ‘the properly utopian program or realization to involve a commitment to closure (and thereby to totality).’ And this commitment to closure has ‘momentous consequences,’ Jameson warns us, as he calls our attention to the utopia as enclave, both as problem and as condition of possibility (4).

Streeby’s presentation of closure and totality resonates with the destructive community-building that Ina elders practice in their attempts to erase Shori’s queer, afrofuturist, experiences from Ina history throughout the novel. These totalizing practices support a utopian enclave build on hierarchical separation between ostensibly superior Ina and genetically inferior humans; these practices also preclude

Shori’s afrofuturist hybridity as a condition for possibility.

Ina elders attack Shori’s family because of her family’s success with her bioengineered Blackness and resulting tolerance to the sun, despite the possibilities diurnal life would create for the species. The feared the possible changes she might being to Ina society. Iosif contextualizes this possibility when listing the reasons Shori survives the attack that kills most of their family and leaves her blinded and amnesiac in a nondescript cave. He ruminates, “The sun wouldn’t disable her at once. She’s a

106 faster runner than most [Ina], in spite of her small size. And she would have come awake faster when everything started. She’s a light sleeper, compared to most of us, and she doesn’t absolutely have to sleep during the day” (66). Shori’s difference represents “revolutionary” change and possibility for Ina. Her learning process through that difference represents a labor of freedom for her and other humans who do not enjoy full mutualism in traditional Ina communities.

Shori’s labor for freedom also hints at disruptive possibility in other learning environments, including the collective teaching and learning spaces bell hooks explores in her discussion of transformative education.122 As George Yancy notes,

“hooks suggests that it is within the field of possibility that we have the occasion to labor for freedom qua collective transformational possibilities. Hence, a matrix of possibility functions as the condition for the occasion to labor and work for freedom”

(34). While Shori’s queered difference presents a matrix of possibility for Ina and humans in Fledging, the intersecting identities of queer, Black learners provide an important occasion for educator-scholars and students to work for freedom in inclusive afrofuturist pedagogical spaces. But this work requires what Yancy describes as critical openness. Yancy argues that:

Openness of mind and heart creates the possibility of being touched by the other, transformed by the other, even as one maintains a healthy sense of criticality. It is within a community of others that the sense of self is

122 See Yancy’s “Engaging Whiteness and the Practice of Freedom: The Creation of Subversive Academic Spaces” that contributes to the edited volume Critical Perspectives on bell hooks (2009).

107 challenged and transformed, that we are taken “out of ourselves,” that the sense of the self-certainty might be challenged and shattered (35).

The idea of challenging and shattering the pedagogical self in relationship to a

“community of others” can be frightening, despite its potential transformative power; it necessarily affects how we organize instructor and student labor in classroom spaces; it also pushes educator-scholars to think about how the Black body operates in teaching and learning spaces that nurture critical openness and collective knowledge building.123

Fledgling positions “the classroom” as an embodied space that challenges readers to think critically about what it means to queer the canon and shape the utopian project of education. Shori grapples with the complexities of this challenge when she makes an instructive visit to Theodora, her female symbiont and queer sexual partner. With Shori on her lap, Theodora explains “You are a vampire…[a]lthough according to what I’ve read, you’re supposed to be a tall, handsome, fully grown white man” (91). In addition to recalling Martha’s initial description of God in “The Book of Martha,” the meta-commentary in this passage references the canonical exclusion of the Black body and contextualizes Butler’s intervention in the text. This passage also highlights an important connection between

123 In fact, Yancy asserts that “[a]n engaged pedagogical space, then, is one where a plurality of voices are valorized, where students are participants in the space of transformative speech and action, where students are not threatened to engage the professor through the process of elenchus” (39). This speaks to the multiplicity of discursive interventions that are open to students in a critically engaged space.

108 pedagogical space and canonical sites of erasure and “disappearance.”124 Embodied educational practices work to combat this erasure of minority histories and perspectives for students and educators of color.125 In Fledgling, Shori must learn this lesson.

Like Martha, Shori’s perspective challenges the white, masculine ideal and reveals it as both limited and dangerously single-minded; Shori’s body reframes the trope of the sexualized, disempowered Black woman and associates her narrative with a history that subverts the canon of white men. With this, her narrative chronicles the physical and intellectual development of a voracious learner who seeks to make herself whole from precious pieces of memory and collectivist instructive experiences.

As Yancy describes, “to strive for wholeness—a mode of being and pedagogical engagement that does not fragment the self—within the context of the classroom is to transgress deep and perennial philosophical narratives which tend to bifurcate the self and perpetuate the assumption that learning and knowledge are divorced from embodiment” (35). Coupling this conception of wholeness with Yancy’s earlier description of critical openness offers a vision of pedagogical engagement that more

124 See Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993) 125 See Giroux’s “Critical Pedagogy and the Postmodern/Modern Divide: Towards a Pedagogy of Democratization” in which he suggests that “education as a utopian project is not simply about fostering critical consciousness but also about teaching students to take responsibility for their perspective, be they personal, political, or global” (2004).

109 fully represents Shori’s learning process and makes room for a deeper discussion of the queer space she creates with her symbiont community.

Defining Queer Space and Community in Critical Pedagogical Practice

Queer learning spaces are generally underexplored in discussions of critical pedagogy, particularly for students and educator-scholars of color. Looking back on his experiences as a queer Black educator-scholar, Bryant Keith Alexander argues that

“instructional gaps…exist between our teaching persona and the fullness of our being.”126 He also affirms what I see as the palimpsestic realities of pedagogical agency for queer Black educator-scholars, writing, “[o]ur sexualized and racialized bodies always signal a history, an enfleshed knowledge that may or may not, to our students, obviously inform our pedagogy and our orientation to the subject matter.”127

This acknowledgment of embodied lessons connects with the challenges Jacob

McWilliams and William Penual note in their engagement with queer perspectives in the learning sciences.

McWilliams and Penual question the ways we grapple with queerness and the aforementioned role of totalizing narratives in teaching and learning, arguing that

“[g]ender and sexual identity are, after all, simultaneous flimsy fictions and powerful

126 See Bryant Keith Alexander’s “Embracing the Teachable Moment: The Black Gay body in the Classroom as an Embodied Text” (2005). 127 Ibid.

110 realities for us all” (100).128 Their concepts of “flimsy fictions” and “powerful realities” underscore afrofuturism’s imaginative potential for queer Black folx. When placed in relationship to afrofuturist pedagogy, queer theory questions assumptions about gender and sexuality by offering practitioners a way to “inform learning sciences as an explicit effort to transform learning spaces with and for queer youth, to help bring about a world that does not exist”, and to amplify Black queer futurity in the classroom.

Utopian potential manifests in spaces that include queer pedagogical design practices that challenge totalizing “outcomes” and that undermine progress narratives which bury queer possibility. Articulating concerns with problematic progress narratives that flatten queer identities, McWilliams and Penual argue that “[o]ne of the ways we problematize progress narratives in the undergraduate course is to emphasize repeatedly how laws and institutions constrain possible futures of young people”

(108).129 This critique of laws and institutions can help deconstruct the myth of equal access to educational attainment and pave the way for expansive explorations of what’s possible in digital classroom spaces; the critique also offers a glimpse into imaginative counter-public approaches to classroom interaction that include digital engagement, constructive conflict, and instructive play.

128 See Jacob McWilliams and William R Penuel’s “Queer Theory in the Learning Sciences” in Indigo Esmonde and Angela N. Booker’s edited volume: Power and Privilege in the Learning Sciences (2016) 129 See Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018)

111 It’s important to focus on the significance that queer speculative fiction holds for critical pedagogy, if we hope to nurture instructive play within generative classroom conflicts and discuss the palimpsestic possibility of imaginative difference that exists within the confines of constructive contradictions. The speculative expands the boundaries of the possible to make room for and “bring about a world that does not exist”—a world that scaffolds and reconditions historically flimsy futures with the goal of realizing utopic potentiality for queer students of color.130 Shori embraces the implications of this potentiality both through her body and in her community—or

“chosen family.”131

Fledgling’s epilogue opens in a place of darkness, pain, and hunger that reminds us of Shori’s awakening at the beginning of the novel. But Shori is no longer alone in this space. After a violent confrontation with a bigoted Ina elder who leaves

Shori badly wounded and in need of deep healing, Shori narrates, “I regained consciousness slowly. It was like struggling up through mud. I was naked except for one of Wright’s big T-shirts. Someone had undressed me and put me to bed. The room was very dark...In fact this felt like awakening in the cave” (307). For the second time

130 See “How Does a Queer Theorist Work?” a podcast episode from Slate’s Working series with Elizabeth Freeman and Jacob Brogan. In this episode Freeman describes three critical genealogies that intersect in her queer theory teaching. These include: woman of color feminism, AIDS theory, and high critical theory. She also encapsulates her conception of “the queerest time of all” as the “undifferentiated flow of writing” in which worlds are created. 131 Phillip Hanmack et al.’s “Queer Intimacies: A New Paradigm for the Study of Relationship Diversity” (2018).

112 in the text, Shori emerges. But her experience in this final moment is marked by the mutualistic community she has created and the lessons she has learned over the course of the novel.

Although Shori awakens senseless and hungry after days of intense healing, she stops herself from harming Wright, who sits close by. She shares, “the hunger was a massive twisting hurt inside me, but I would not touch him” (307). She also realizes the toll her difference had taken on her family and the significance of her existential transformation through essential questions: “What about my mother and sisters, my father and brothers? What about my memory? They were all gone. The person I had been was gone” (310). Neither her memory nor her biological family survive the attempts on her life, by the end of the novel; but Shori creates a new symbiotic community that supports her difficult learning process and affirms the utopic potential of her queer Black womanhood.

By the end of the novel, both Wright and Shori acknowledge her difficult learning process. In their final conversation about a message from Joan—one of the few Ina females who embrace Shori’s hybridity—Wright shares, “Joan says if you’re going to survive on your own, you’ll need good teachers, and she’s willing to be one of them. She also said she thought you’d make a damn good ally someday.” After ruminating on her re-membered past and recovered present, Shori agrees with Joan’s assessment and responds “[Joan is] right. I will’” (310). These final passages offer a glimpse of imaginative possibility from an Ina elder who affirms the transformative potential of afrofuturist change. We also learn that afrofuturist pedagogy is hopeful

113 pedagogy that assumes individual transformation through communal engagement.

This has important implications for digital learning that affirm queer efforts to foster inclusive communities in future classroom spaces (30).132

In their collaborative project Critical Race Theory Matters, Education and

Ideology, Margaret Zamudio, Caskey Russell, Francisco Rios, and Jacquelyn

Bridgeman offer an approach to critical race consciousness that intersects with queer identity and resists closed pedagogy. They suggest approaches to building a

“curriculum of social activism” that:

begins with helping students develop a critical consciousness which allows them to think judiciously about oppressive ideological orientations, a vision of possibility rooted in historical and contemporary examples of resistance, an understanding of how this oppression and resistance is part of their own lived experiences and a skill set to help them to pursue actions that foster social justice (94).

Their language positions critical consciousness as a polyvalent practice that requires active engagement and provides students of color with agency-affirming tools that contextualize and challenge exclusionary learning spaces. Pushing their vision a bit further, I suggest that afrofuturist pedagogy fosters critical digital consciousness that weds “historical and contemporary examples of resistance” with an expanded vision of imaginative technological praxis. This inclusive vision empowers queer students of

132 For an intimate group discussion and storytelling session surrounding the question “what do we need to unlearn?” See “Queer Pedagogies and LGBTQ instructors” (2018)

114 color to pursue social activism by realizing education as a labor of freedom and transformative work that affirms embodied experiences.

Afrofuturism Online: Creating an Imaginative Digital Learning Praxis

“Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles and we can keep asking ourselves—how do I learn from this?” (Brown, 105)

Essential Question: How might educators engage in knowledge-building with students while acknowledging the complexities of creating and sharing inclusive pedagogical approaches that center afrofuturism and social justice praxis within digital environments?

Thus far in this chapter, we’ve looked to Butler’s creative knowledge work for examples of imaginative spaces where teaching and learning inhere in intentional worldbuilding and complex character development. We’ve also examined the ways

Black female protagonists embrace the realities of their difference to better navigate singular pedagogical experiences in her texts. In many instances, their experiences push them to engage with, work through, and reflect on fundamental assumptions about their agency and identity in relationship to a larger teaching and learning process. In this final portion of the chapter, I shift from close reading Butler’s textual work to engaging with adrienne maree brown’s discussion of “emergent strategies for change.” I place brown’s discussion in conversation with other connected texts to offer a framework for social justice teaching and learning that informs afrofuturist instructional design, scaffolds imaginative pedagogical praxis, and extends Butler’s legacy.

115 Brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017) is a hypertextual document that connects a variety of “elements”—expressed through prose, poetry, drawings, bulleted lists, tables and other mediums—to communicate her vision of Butler’s work and the possibilities of change. As brown notes,

In [Butler’s] twelve novels and her short stories, [Butler] created case studies that teach how to lead inside of change, shaping change. I’ve been calling what I learn from her work emergent strategy. Based in the science of emergence, it’s relational, adaptive, fractal, interdependent, decentralized, transformative (56).

While brown uses this strategy to facilitate gatherings and create transformative spaces for organizational development, I argue that “emergent strategy” also offers educator- scholars a way to create transformative pedagogical spaces for digital and hybrid learning that help shape change in society at large. Emergent Strategy memorializes brown’s educational process through a curated collection of palimpsestic artifacts that communicate a rhizomatic strategy for change. We see this in the way she represents the “relational, adaptive, fractal, interdependent, decentralized, [and] transformative” elements that constitute her vision:

Element Nature of Element Fractal The Relationship Between Small and Large Adaptive How we Change Interdependence and Decentralization Who We Are and How we Share Non-linear and Iterative The Pace and Pathways of Change Resilience and Transformative Justice How we Recover and Transform Creating more Possibilities How we Move Towards Life

1: A framework for Emergent Strategies. Chart from Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change and Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 50. Print.

116 This table offers a framework for recognizing, working through, and shaping change.

The first element, “fractal,” is particularly important for digital learning space, as it frames the systemic significance of the labor educator-scholars and students do in these “small scale” spaces. As brown argues, “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system” (53, Italics in original). Brown does not include imagination in this table, but it exists as an essential subtext for each element in

Emergent Strategies and for the world(s) educator-scholars and students create in digital learning space(s).

Building on the elements that brown offers in Emergent Strategy and the concepts I’ve explored earlier in this chapter, I suggest that transformative learning requires imagination, openness, and adaptive engagement with generative difference.

Of these requirements, imagination is perhaps the most important; it offers a way to revise what brown describes as a “framework of failure”—or the systemic regulation of iterative, palimpsestic, meaning-making—into a model of emergent change.

Supporting the role imagination plays in creating engaged classroom spaces, bell hooks references imagination’s relationship to critical consciousness by noting that

“[i]n the ongoing critique of dominator culture, thinkers and/or activists dedicated to changing society…called attention to the “colonization” of the mind and imagination”

(hooks 60). Here we see a relationship between brown’s framework of failure and hook’s critique of colonization—particularly when we think about how colonizer culture has defined failure, success, and critical engagement in the classroom.

117 Frameworks of failure, whether expressed in rigid depersonalized assessment models or between the lines of bulleted curricular goals, can work to discourage and devalue the imagination, even while they proffer progress. These models and goals can also work to flatten difference and change, even as they purport to increase precision and practicality. But, as Sean Michael Morris notes, “[t]he imagination is not an impractical facility at all, not a dreamer’s tool only, but a precision instrument that delivers a certainty that things can be otherwise; and in the face of circumstances that are unfair, the imagination gives us insight into what is just.” As I suggest in this dissertation’s introduction, imagination also gives us a vision of who we can become, which I read as a powerful “instrument” against erasure for Black folx and other people of color.133 Morris’s vision of imagination offers an important perspective for addressing brown’s question of how we “shift into a culture in which conflict and difference are generative” (132) especially when, as hooks notes, “[t]eachers rarely talk about the role imagination plays in helping to create and sustain the engaged classroom” (59). To my mind, afrofuturist pedagogy is engaged pedagogy that fosters generative conflict within and around imaginative encounters with persistent

133 See Morris’s “An Upsurge of Questioning and Critique: toward a Community of Critical Pedagogy” in which he explores the realities and injustices of hierarchical higher-education spaces and the exclusive worlds they perpetuate—worlds that do damage to, and colonize, the imagination.

118 problems—especially when those problems are historically constructed and scripted to pathologize Blackness and the Black imaginary.134

When moved into hybrid and digital space, the afrofuturist classroom can foster supportive realities for Black folx and other people of color through socially connected, publicly engaged, and intentionally inclusive communities that embrace

“interdependence and decentralization” and affirm “who we are and how we share”

(83).135 Instead of thinking of technologically mediated knowledge-building as an unavoidable byproduct of the digital era, in which students are already connected to a range of complementary and competing information, it may be helpful to frame hybrid and online classrooms as useful interstitial spaces in which the transformative potential of digital learning meets the dangers of distracting, increasingly divisive digital content. To be sure, critical engagement with digital content demands a fundamental literacy that is often erroneously assumed outside of classroom spaces.

It’s important to embrace the fractal nature of critical digital literacy; it shapes social and political engagement by offering citizen-students an entry point into larger societal knowledge creation and sharing via the classroom.

As democratic ideals give way to technocratic realities throughout the U.S, critical digital literacy equips students to challenge and shape our collective understanding of participatory action; it also gives students a sense of agency, by

134 See W.E.B Dubois perineal question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” in The Souls of Black Folks (1903) 135 See David Harris “Rhizomatic education and Deleuzian Theory” (2016)

119 reifying their individual voices and experiences through iterative practices that resonate with Butler’s imaginative narratives about learning and adapting.136 In this, students and teachers work together to determine how connection and advancement are defined within what Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter describe as

“knowledge building communities” (98).

Providing a bit of context for the role that digital media and web-based content delivery play in learning, Scardamalia and Bereiter argue that “the internet becomes more than a desktop library and a rapid mail-delivery system. It becomes the first realistic means for students to connect with civilization-wide knowledge building and to make their classroom work a part of it” (98). Their assertion about civilization-wide knowledge building extends the Burkean parlor into an ideation space that is both porous and global.

Knowledge-building work also provides new avenues for creative expression.

Indeed, Scardamalia and Bereiter suggest that “creative knowledge work” should be able to exist within the classroom as an entity that is in dialogue with and distinct from scholarly discourse—while existing as “work that advances the state of knowledge within some community of practice, however broadly or narrowly that community may be defined” (98). This reading of knowledge production is particularly useful for queer(ed) students and educator-scholars of color who are continually marginalized in

136 The ALA’s Digital Literacy Taskforce defines digital literacy as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”

120 digital communities of practice. More specifically, creative knowledge work empowers these students to “situate” their voices in “larger societal knowledge building effort[s]” that often exclude minority perspectives such as the one’s Butler imagines in “The Book of Martha” and Fledgling.137

Of course, creative knowledge work in digital communities also requires a nuanced definition of digital literacy that makes room for critical content creation and analysis in digital engagement while accounting for the demands of adaptive digital literacies. Building on established discussions of problem-based learning and on brown’s ides of “how we share,” afrofuturist pedagogy imagines classrooms as communal engagement spaces that empower students to think collaboratively and critically about complex social and political issues. Both instructors and students play the role of educators and multimodal collaborators in these spaces.

Multimodal collaboration helps creative knowledge workers (re)present the realities of aggressive marginalization that determine positionality and presence in digital spaces. It also serves an impetus for us to examine the ways adaptive digital technologies, and their accepted avenues for critical engagement, affect the ways

“non-traditional” students of color are embodied in prescribed classroom spaces. The digital format can encourage inclusive classrooms in which space and place are

137 hooks reminds us that minority students may first need to unleash their imaginations and decolonize their minds, to situate their voices. Martha learns this lesson firsthand when she confronts her internalized racism in “The Book of Martha.” Shori learns this lesson from racist Ina elders when she confronts their fear of her queer, post-human Blackness at the end of Fledging.

121 bounded only by the strictures of digital literacies, instructional design, and what brown refers to as “full-bodied…collaboration”; but this isn’t necessarily so (9).138

Adaptive Knowledge Building and Afrofuturist Instructional Design

Many digital spaces continue to perpetuate discriminatory practices against, and systemic erasures of, marginalized voices. These erasures are also embedded in projects that shape digital studies. Speaking from the perspective of critical race, gender, and sexuality studies, Amy Earheart argues that “without careful and systematic analysis of our digital canons, we not only reproduce antiquated understandings of the canon but also reify them through our technological imprimatur”

(310). While Earheart focuses on the role of digital recovery in digital humanities scholarship and practice, her critique of the digital canon has significant implications for race and difference in the digital classroom.

Earheart’s critique is particularly salient for students of color whose engagement in digital spaces help exemplify the sociohistorical disconnect between canonical digital projects and the creation of digital learning artifacts educator- scholars seek to support. Earhart suggests that “if, indeed, we are beginning to construct a digital canon that weighs content and technological choices equally, then it is crucial for digital humanists to theorize the technological with the same rigor as we theorize the content” (315). In response, I suggest that afrofuturist instructional design

138 See brown’s Emergent Strategy.

122 (AID) offers a framework for theorizing digital tools and spaces that are informed by social justice, imaginative knowledge-work, and emergent strategies for technologically mediated change. Here, I bend the arc of brown’s “intentional adaption” toward imaginative digital interventions that support pedagogical freedom for Black folx and other people of color.

In order to understand how AID supports the pedagogical practice of freedom in digital learning spaces, it’s important to get a sense of what Hilgert et al. describe as internet interventions or “innovative programs designed to teach skills, increase knowledge, and change behaviors, symptoms, or other targeted attributes” yet they fail to specifically acknowledge race, gender, or sexuality (3). They argue that internet interventions often “target specific behavioral, psychological, motivational, or health education outcomes, or a combination of these” (3). Their work carefully explores the perceived gap between participants in mediation settings and “learners” in educational settings, contending that “although internet-delivered intervention participants may not think of themselves as learners, they share the fundamental characteristic with learners of any intervention or involvement in a program with the aim of change, improvement, or advancement” (3). Their language offers a useful way to frame what I see as an overlapping conversation about education and intervention online.

In fact, Hilgert et al.’s study aligns with the social and cultural aspects of intervention that I present in this chapter. While in dialogue with the “aim for change” they suggest in their work, I highlight the interventive aspect of their efforts while focusing on the ideological ends and the tautological methods of change. Afrofuturist

123 pedagogy, including the critical practices that support its iteration in online and hybrid classroom spaces, offers a form of discursive intervention that necessitates radical change by centering the palimpsestic realities of race, sexuality, and gender in future- focused instructional design.

To provide some context for instructional design and the critical conversations that shape its current place in digital learning environments, Hilgert et al. offer three descriptors that are inherent to the field. For them, instructional design is, at base, a science that is “concerned with how to help people learn more effectively,” through methods that connect teaching and learning praxis. They also see it as a “field of practice” which involves professionals and scholars who construct measurable

“specifications for the development, design, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance” of teaching and learning spaces.

Hilgert et al. represent instructional design as an activity that “employs process models to guide the systemic development of instructional specifications drawing on learning, instructional, motivational, and behavioral theory to ensure the quality of instructional strategies.” Although this layered formulation makes room for interdisciplinary and discipline-specific interventions in digital learning spaces, the combination of results and process-oriented language indicates a “systems thinking” approach that can be limiting—particularly when student knowledge-building is sublimated into learning outcomes which prioritize uniform pedagogical effectiveness and efficiency over interventive pedagogical practices. However, Hilgert et. al’s definition does provide a glimpse into the scope and depth of concerns that affect

124 instructional design and the educator-scholars who use it to construct digital learning spaces.

AID reminds us to examine the relationship between Black students, educator- scholars, and digital technologies in order to fully embrace the range of necessary interventions for imaginative teaching and learning online. These interventive instructional design practices account for the alienating aspects of digital learning by scaffolding the transition from marginalization to empowerment for students of color via imaginative knowledge building communities in digital learning. In this pedagogical space, AID encourages co-learners to study critical worldbuilding practices that create open spaces for sharing and discussion, to grapple with the complexities of time, memory, and (a)synchronous connection across digital landscapes, and to invite instructive play that encourages individual and collaborative knowledge work within imaginatively seeded makerspaces. Brown embraces the reality of heterogeneity in these makerspaces when she reminds us to make room for

“futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same person” (57). This approach also requires radical empathy and iterative efforts to represent digital wholeness through what afrofuturist educator-scholar Netrice Gaskins describes as “techno vernacular creativity.”

Brown’s presentation of Emergent Strategy and Hilgert et al’s work on digital interventions create a compelling dialogue with the critical imagination and responsive placemaking that frame Gaskins’s techno-vernacular creativity. The first concept in

Gaskins’ framing, “reappropriation,” describes a form of sociocultural hacking in

125 which “Afrofuturists reclaim cultural artifacts, often to counter dominant social or political systems.” This alone offers an opportunity for interventive storytelling and reparative worldbuilding that recover and embrace palimpsestic memorialization. The next concept, “improvisation,” involves encounters with difference that require

“problem solving, or reacting in the moment and in response to one’s environment” that can lead to the “invention of new practices…and/or new ways of acting.”

Shori exemplifies this in her self-learning process and in the mutualistic relationships she builds in Fledgling, just as Martha exemplifies this in her mutualistic discussion with God. Building on these examples, educator-scholars can engage in assessment hacking, or collaborative “invention,” by making space for students to create and discuss their own models and criteria for future-focused assessment in conversation with activities and systems that have shaped previous engagement efforts in other less inclusive learning spaces. Gaskin’s last method involves “reinvention (of the self)” or “re-mixing” which includes reckoning with the possibility of “existing in and moving between worlds or realities” (30-31). We see this in Martha’s vision for a better, sustainable humanity that she offers from an extra-physical reality of her making.

The reinvention process foregrounds the interventive potential of imaginative play, reflection, and participatory action that are foundational to a pedagogical framework for change. Pushing Gaskins’s concept toward what brown describes as

“decentralized work,” I also see reinvention as both an individual and collaborative exercise that, as brown suggests, “requires more trust building on the front end” (70).

126 While this “front-end” work is important for instructional design practices in general, it is particularly important for AID praxis—especially when it comes to seeding the imagination for educator-scholars and students of color. In digital space, the front-end imaginative labor paves the way for archival (re)framing that communicates students’ positionalities and connective knowledge building work beyond the delimited timeframe and space of a given course. This perspective asks students to create a collective framework for participatory action that has broader interventive purposes and shapes the contours of palimpsestic memorialization in future pedagogical worlds.

In other words, AID provides educator-scholars and students with tools to engage in transformative labor through pedagogical worldbuilding that ends—and is perpetually reinvented—in imaginative change.

An Open Conclusion: Pedagogical Worldbuilding and Imaginative Change

In his autobiographical work Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that "[i]n America, it is traditional to destroy the Black body--it is heritage"

(103). Palimpsestic echoes of this refrain resonate in my analysis of Butler’s afrofuturist pedagogical work in this chapter’s first sections as well as in scholarship on technologically mediated Black embodiment.139 We also hear echoes of this refrain

139 See Carol Henderson’s mediations on intersectional race and gender representations in Imagining the Black Female Body: Reconciling Image in Print and Visual Culture (2010) and Safiya Noble’s more recent exploration of digitally encoded prejudice in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018).

127 in brown’s Emergent Strategy. Each of these works present overlapping realities built on strategic palimpsestic memorialization of the Black body and its heritage.

Afrofuturist pedagogy invites us to expand this strategy by making room for interventive digital placemaking and intentional worldbuilding that combat algorithmic racism in digital space.

Recognizing their inherited challenges, digital spaces offer opportunities to negotiate and reinvent the terms of place, time, and embodiment with each interaction.

Ashleigh Wade describes this in terms of “a theory of world making” that “views humans as affective/affected virtual-physical assemblages” in order to ground her discussion of “the transformative potential of virality” and “viral Blackness” in social media’s digital counter-public spaces (33). These hybrid assemblages and the spaces they occupy invite educator-scholars to consider how we experience participation and presence in asynchronous digital environments. Connecting the transformative potential of digital presence with inclusive world-building in teaching and learning,

AID invites educator-scholars to think critically about compulsory introduction activities and other teaching and learning projects that validate the virtual-physical assemblages students create and grapple with in digital counter-public classroom space; this approach contrasts with the heritage of erasure and destruction in the U.S.

In addition to asking for names, preferred pronouns, and decontextualized bites of general experiences, an initial worldbuilding exercise might riff on Shori’s self- learning process in Fledgling. This might invite educator-scholars and students to create, remediate, and share a digital artifact that encourages palimpsestic

128 memorialization via a poetic historical narrative. As an exercise in modeling openness, educators-scholars could begin this sharing process with their own introduction as a potential illustration. For instance, my historical narrative might involve an “I Am

From” poem that reflects on Black queer identity:

I am from unadulterated funk and thick thighs, from Rena Ann and Milo

I am from speak your mind and give ya last dime, from Sang, baby! and Stop being so noisy!

I am from knee-bowed and body-bent, laughing through the violence.

I am from trolley tracks and cotton fields, butter pound cake and ambrosia, from parachuting barbies and boys dancing with intertwined fingers.

I am from backroom bookshelves—thick with memories of thin times.

I am from that web of becoming: angles of incidence, double-refracting the light.140

Along with written text, this reflective artifact might invite students to create an audio reading that’s augmented with contextually representative images. Students could share this multimodal creation as an example of digital embodiment and offer a response to another’s fabulation that ends with a question. These examples help outline a potential approach to tone-setting in the digital classroom that honors the process of digital making and memorialization while encouraging openness and play.

To inspire further engagement, educator-scholars might build a metacognitive

140 I wrote this “I Am From” poem using a model that’s offered in the University of Minnesota’s Center for Educational Innovation’s “I Am From Activity Guide”. (2016). I’ve adapted their model to offer a sample reflective artifact in this chapter.

129 component into this introductory poem exercise that encourages all participants to reflect on the questions that resonate with them, the connections they notice between poems, and the feelings they associate with sharing and remediating their story and body in digital space.

The vulnerability in sharing can be both rewarding and generative in the online classroom; but sharing also involves risk. To mitigate some of the potential risks, it helps to ask participants to contribute only what’s comfortable for them. This front- end acknowledgement of possible discomfort and agency-giving option to choose what’s shared, establishes a precedent of careful presence and inquiry. It also decenters the educator-scholar’s role in the classroom—particularly as participants establish their own angles of incidence in relationship to the memorialized experiences they encounter in each artifact.

Another example of techno-vernacular creativity involves challenging students to participate in Martha’s pedagogical thought experiment in conjunction with course specific teaching and learning that takes place in a digital classroom space.

Understanding that Martha’s solution for humanity’s survival eventually involves vivid utopic dreams, educator-scholars might ask students to imagine and share their own visions for the future. This project need not be divorced from the materials that shape the course. On the contrary, this vision can build on concepts and ongoing discussion within the course while encouraging students to engage in counter-public discourse outside of the course’s digital space. Mixing established research with

130 imaginative inquiry and experiential worldbuilding, students might work to answer the following questions:

 If you could change one fundamental thing about the human species that would ensure that the most disadvantaged among us survive and thrive in the future, what would it be and why?  How might current and/or imagined future technology help us realize this change?  What does available research say about your proposed approach?  How will we grapple with the potential challenges to this vision?

These framing questions invite creative approaches to address an interdisciplinary problem that requires students to work in dialogue with and create diverse knowledge- building resources. The questions’ openness leaves room for serendipity and free queer expression. These questions also make space for an ecosystem of supporting activities and thought experiments that problematize totalizing utopias and inspire afrofuturist visions.

An example thought experiment might begin with a collaborative ideation exercise that uses a digital mind mapping tool. This process could lead to a series of individual and group web-annotation activities that ask students to mark-up, and discuss how others have marked-up, a range of digital objects that speak to elements of their imagined change—from widely available data sets to digitally gated archival materials. After exploring avenues for representing their vision through low-stakes, ideation, research, and synthesis activities, students might participate in a drafting workshop that encourages decentralized peer feedback and non-linear, iterative play.

The proposed project benefits from a design process that encourages educator- scholars to support students’ techno-vernacular creativity and pedagogical world-

131 building. As a result, students might come up with a host of possible artifacts, including a speculative mock-up of an augmented reality empathy implant that deconstructs and remixes experiential and distributional data across a spatially and temporally flexible neural network. Students might create a podcast about aspects of this speculative artifact that allows them to unpack a disciplinarily situated problem and chronicle conversations about their worldbuilding process.

A student who is interested in climate gentrification and future projections of urban population growth in the US might create a digital mock-up of a tool that promotes individually contextualized connections to sentient and non-sentient life in an imagined city. Another student’s project might involve “thick”141 storytelling that outlines the ways their vision of change helps families reckon with persistent and pervasive expressions of systemic injustices in real-world communities. Stories might include visual maps that depict expanded tree canopies and vertical green spaces in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods. Stories might also imagine ways to address inequality by adjusting how humans conceptualize failure, development, and growth, both in large scale societal reflection habits and in small scale classroom assessment strategies.

The framework of failure, mentioned earlier in this chapter, can lead students to internalize and become numb to inequality—particularly when it manifests in the

141 See Cottom’s Thick (2019), a collection of personal essays that enact “thick description” through intertextual storytelling and, what I read as, a palimpsestic memorialization of the Black feminist gaze.

132 spaces they navigate most often. Decontextualized grades contribute to this framework of failure and act as artificial instruments of systemic injustice that flatten authentic assessment and force all effort, engagement, and potentiality into prescribed boxes.142

This is counterproductive in classroom spaces where co-learners are asked to think critically, thoughtfully, and creatively about the pedagogical world and body of work they’ve built. Although a collection of grades is often used to measure engagement and performance, most of us read the assemblage as an indicator for learning.

To be sure, accountability to self and to others matters. As such, AID proposes mutual accountability structures that are built around an adaptive, decentralized, and collaborative feedback schema. AID suggests that students and educator-scholars imagine this schema and engage in the pedagogical worldbuilding process together; it also proposes that students and educator-scholars are held accountable to the criteria they’ve agreed upon. This will likely present more challenges than the flattened alternative. But participatory action is a practice of freedom for those marginalized co- learners who aren’t afforded pedagogical agency or agency in social change.

Tressie McMillan Cottom speaks to the importance of creativity and agency in social change during a recorded conversation with Roxanne Gay. Responding to a question about critical creative thought in public discourse, Cottom reminds us that,

“[a]s a creative person and a thinking person, you have to have enough self-doubt to

142 See Susan Blum’s “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College (2017)

133 be reflexive and enough arrogance to think that you matter enough to be heard.”143 In many ways, this chapter is a response to writing what matters. As a queer Black nerd who has lived and learned through the truths of public marginalization and private self-doubt—from Philadelphia’s k-12 public schools, through undergraduate and post- graduate programs at public universities—Cottom’s words strike me as personal and political in the ways that matter.144

Afrofuturist pedagogy lives within a web of sensitivity, critical mutualism, and adaptability. It also requires dynamic levels of reflexivity, creativity, and arrogance.

On the surface, arrogance may seem unlike, and potentially antithetical to, teaching and learning. But for Black folx and other people of color, strategic arrogance can mean the difference between being erased through cis-hetero, imperialist, patriarchal, white-supremacist socio-pedagogical practices and being embraced through imaginative socio-pedagogical strategies for resistance that shape change.

Arrogance is subversive, when used to challenge systemic injustices that help operationalize pathological homogeneity and self-doubt. In fundamentally hierarchical—teacher-centered—learning environments, arrogance is critical for marginalized students who work to be heard. We see this construction of reflexive

143 See Roxanne Gay and Tressie Macmillan Cottom’s conversation about creative knowledge-work—particularly the portion of their exchange that highlights the dearth of Black women in, what they describe as, “the Ta-Nehisi Coates” realm of Black intellectual journalist, space. 144 See Sarah Knopp and Jeff Bale’s Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (2012) and Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro (2013)

134 critical arrogance in “The Book of Martha” and Fledgling through their strong-willed

Black protagonists who fight to change social systems that devalue their perspectives and erase their stories. We also see it in potential discussions of universal design and accessibility in afrofuturist pedagogy seeded in Sami Shalk and Theri Pickens’ work on disability, race, and gender. But, as Tressie McMillan Cottom and Roxanne Gay suggest, arrogance should not exist in an individualized vacuum, no matter how thickly constructed; on the contrary, arrogance is most effective for marginalized people when it empowers us to think about and create avenues for access and presence that lead to generative change.

I began this chapter by underscoring the precarious state of education in the

U.S. and the systemic injustices it perpetuates and legitimizes for people of color.

Understanding the breadth and depth of the problem, I quickly narrowed this chapter’s scope to focus on palimpsestic memorialization and the embedded connections between counter-public engagement, queer space-making, and critical pedagogy in

Octavia Butler’s work; my primary intention was to position Butler’s work, and afrofuturism more broadly, in relationship to adaptive knowledge building and digital classroom praxis. My secondary intention was to model an imaginative, inquisitive, and inclusive process of becoming that creates discursive space for future discussions of afrofuturist pedagogy and instructional design. At this critical moment in palimpsestic time, I have the requisite reflexivity and arrogance to know that these efforts matter enough to be heard.

135 Chapter 5

CONCLUSION: AFROFUTURIST AUDIOTOPIA AND CREATIVE

KNOWLEDGE-WORK

On Being Heard

I ended the previous chapter with an “open conclusion” about reflexivity and critical listening in pedagogical spaces. Chapter 4—"A Lasting Truth: Octavia

Butler’s Afrofuturist Pedagogy and Digital Learning Praxis”—embraces Black folx who fight to “be heard” in pedagogical systems that flatten their creative expression and knowledge work—through cis-hetero, imperialist, patriarchal, white-supremacist frameworks of success and failure. This chapter continues the discussion of critical listening via afrofuturist audiotopia and Janelle Monáe’s imaginative musical projects.

I argue that creative knowledge-work and pedagogical worldbuilding are integral to

Janelle Monáe’s sonic landscapes. Furthermore, I suggest that Monáe’s approach to sharing afrofuturist audiotopias invites us to rethink the dissertation genre as a creative worldbuilding project.

Afrofuturist music advances interventive storytelling through radically imaginative aurality; it helps shape the sonic signature of the Black futurist imaginary by enmeshing traditions of Black orality with strategic worldbuilding; it also confronts socio-political assumptions about who and what “deserves” to be heard. In

Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (2005) Josh Kun argues that “[a]ll musical listening is a form of confrontation, of encounter, of the meeting of the worlds and meanings, when identity is made self-aware and is, therefore, menaced through its own interrogation” (13). This chapter responds to Kun’s assertion about “all music

136 listening” by focusing on afrofuturist music. I argue that afrofuturist music invites audiences to confront the sonic characteristics of what “could be” and grapple with the menacing silences that affirm what is.

In her introduction to a special edition of American Quarterly focused on

“Listening to American Studies,” Kara Keeling discusses menacing silences and the role that sound played in shaping American identity and culture. Keeling argues that we systemically understudy and silence sonic contributions from marginalized peoples. She calls us to reexamine sound in American Studies, suggesting that:

The founding fathers of the 18th century were…selective listeners who used sound to shape an exclusionary auditory politics of self, citizen, and Other. The sound of the free American, then, was built on rendering sonically incomprehensible or silent the Others that freedom refused (455).

These historically exclusive “auditory politics of self” shed light on the cultural importance of Black music in America’s more recent history, especially when we consider sonic appropriation and the aural narratives that influence today’s digital landscape. Afrofuturist music amplifies the sounds of Blackness by advancing an

“auditory politics” of imaginative worldbuilding that resonate across time. We find examples of this auditory politics in albums like Sun Ra’s Space is the Place (1973) and Parliament’s The Mothership Connection (1975), which present imaginative storytelling in sound and visual performances that explore interstellar Black futurist embodiment. We also find more recent transmodal examples in Clipping’s “The

Deep” (2017), and Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady (2013) and Dirty Computer

(2018), which represent the imagined evolution of Black amphibians and queer androids who fight to be heard via science-fictional freedom movements. Monáe’s

137 work in particular establishes aural accounts of freedom fighting through afrofuturist concept albums and audiotopic music.

Josh Kun defines “audiotopia” as a world, or “almost-place,” that listeners encounter in music; I read audiotopia in relationship to the digital space-creation I explore in Chapter 4 and to the playlists I’ve built for each chapter. Kun understands audiotopia as a “space that we can enter into…move around in, inhabit, are safe in, and learn from” (2). For Kun, songs are often social maps that help determine—or divide—communities within audiotopic spaces (3). This dissertation project is deeply invested in alternative audiotopias that challenge the divisive, whitewashed community-building efforts I examine in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. Monáe’s

Afrofuturist concept albums help Black folx determine the sonic qualities of futurist communities by reinterpreting the menacing, manufactured silences of U.S history.

Monáe’s work resides in relationship to other creative knowledge-work that challenges the “selective listening” Keeling foregrounds in her “Listening to American

Studies” essay. I turn to Reynaldo Anderson’s “Afrofuturism 2.0 & the Black

Speculative Art Movement” to contextualize Monáe’s approach. Anderson’s text traces a through-line between historical Black art movements to current artistic work that grapples with the realities of double consciousness and the digital divide.145

Anderson argues that “…the Black Speculative Arts Movement [is] indebted to previous movements like [the Black Arts Movement], Negritude, The Harlem

Renaissance, and other continental and diasporic African speculative movements”

145 Anderson offers an extensive list of “creative intellectuals, mystics and artists” who advanced the Black Speculative Movement, including Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, bell hooks, Sun Ra, George Clinton, Audre Lord, and others who “…challeng[ed] white racist normativity and Black parochialism” (232)

138 (234). He also argues that the Black Speculative Arts Movement is “…a continuation of the historical behavior within the Veil to engage the philosophies of thinkers such as Du Bois, Wright Everett, and others in piercing the Color Line, the Color Curtain, and understanding the digital divide in the face of similarly relevant 21st century challenges” (234). Janelle Monáe engages this 21st century challenge of technologically mediated, queered Black embodiment via her android-centered afrofuturist concept albums.

Cyndi Mayweather and the Afrofuturist Concept Album

Janelle Monáe’s concept albums exemplify futurist Black embodiment by chronicling the social development of her post-human alter-ego: Cyndi Mayweather.

Monáe’s “Alpha Platinum 9000,” post-human, android figure speaks to the historical menacing silences that Keeling references by offering an imaginative counter-voice to post-racial futures that threaten to make Black culture a hermetically sealed thing of the past. The Electric Lady (2013) concept album exemplifies afrofuturist audiotopia through a sonic narrative that chronicles a Black post-human’s successful bid for social representation in a hostile future.

The album affirms Cyndi Mayweather’s call for rebellion by chronicling her queer love affair with a human. Monáe introduces Mayweather in her debut EP

Metropolis: Suite 1 (The Chase) (2007) and continues the android’s journey in her full-length album The ArchAndroid: Suites 2 and 3 (2010). Electric Lady represents suite four and five of Monáe’s Fritz Lang inspired future Metropolis. Of the three interconnected concept albums, Electric Lady chronicles Mayweather’s life through sonic references to Black musical history, prominent Black artists, and the Black radio space. We hear traces of Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie on Reggae Woman,” “Higher

139 Ground,” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin”146 in the Electric Lady’s 1970’s inspired

“Ghetto Woman.” We also hear sonic references to The Jackson 5147 and The

Stylistics148 in Electric Lady’s “It’s Code.” If we listen closely, we can even hear echoes of Lauryn Hill’s 1990’s “To Zion” in Electric Lady’s “Victory.”

Electric Lady presents a version of audiotopia that acknowledges and interrogates the creation and consumption of Black popular culture through music. By focusing on intimate interactions between post-human androids—or “droids”—and humans, the album also signifies on the history of legalized racial segregation and slavery in the U.S. Mayweather’s love for her unnamed human is illegal and ultimately requires her to flee from “bounty hunter” persecution as a social and ideological fugitive.149 In response to Mayweather’s persecution, Monáe introduces a community of droids and droid sympathizers, known as the “droid rebel alliance,” who vow to honor and protect Mayweather—their “Electric Lady #1.” The “droid wonderground’s” radio jockey, DJ Crash Crash, is the voice of this non-violent alliance. He admonishes would-be listeners with the catchphrase: “Don’t throw no rocks; don’t break no glass; just shake your ass.” While this maxim pays homage to the language and cadence of historic Black disc jockeys150 and hints at the ethos of non-violent social justice movements, it also establishes Electric Lady’s rallying cry;

Monáe/Mayweather challenges the electric ladies of the world to wake up and

146 See Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness First Finale (1974) 147 See The Jackson 5 ABC (1970) 148 See the Stylistics’ debut album The Stylistics (1971) 149 Providing a nuanced definition of Fugitivity, Francesca T. Royster suggests that “The fugitive describes the artistic impulse to escape the constraints of the objectification and social death of slavery but also never to fully escape its embodied lessons” (12). 150 See Jocko Henderson influential cadence on New York’s WADO in the 1960s.

140 “preach,” at the end of the album’s first single, “Q.U.E.E.N”; she models a creative approach to this challenge by using music and droid bodies to establish afrofuturist community and audiotopic worldbuilding.

Dan Hassler-Forest invokes the term “story-worlds” to connect worldbuilding and storytelling in afrofuturism and contextualizes afrofuturism’s charge to countermand the racial prejudices that define some 20th century science fiction texts.

Hassler-Forest juxtaposes afrofuturist science fiction with other science fiction forms that use multiculturalism as a gloss for assimilationist utopias—to highlight afrofuturism’s potential to reverse the “cultural dynamic” of, whitewashed, neoliberalism that I explore in Chapter 4. Hassler-Forest traces science fiction’s shift from storytelling to “branded story-worlds” created, and expanded, under the auspices of the digital audience. These story-worlds often advance a capitalist agenda of product- driven commodification and “map” “knowable” environments (284). In contrast, he explores Monáe’s subversive brand of community building through her WondaLand

Society—a utopian collective of afrofuturist artists and activists that include Deep

Cotton, Jidenna, and St. Beauty. Although Hassler-Forest provides a solid reading of

Monáe’s image, subversive rhetoric, and artistic community, he does not closely examine her music and video performances. I argue that Monáe’s music and video performances are imbricated in her afrofuturist audiotopia and the historically situated worldbuilding it advances.

Afrofuturist worldbuilding is a potential weapon for Black folx who seek to challenge the ravages of hegemonic control, and Monae’s Electric Lady is effective ammunition. The album’s first single “Q.U.E.E.N,” featuring Erykah Badu, highlights afrofuturism’s power to foreground representations of embodiment, artistry, and self-

141 expression in popular culture while advancing a subversive critique of fetishistic consumption. The song and video work in concert to parody the consumptive practices that simplify, sensationalize, and silence Black women’s performance—even as it champions the subversive virtues of dance and individual artistic expression. The song and video also build on Erykah Badu’s artistic efforts to evoke past black “freedom movements” and to enmesh current issues of social inequality, political disenfranchisement, and racist beauty standards within the narrative fabric of U.S popular culture.

The video begins with a black background and white letters, referencing The

Wondaland Arts Society—via a “Wondaland Presents” logo—and the acronymic song title, “Q.U.E.E.N.” A female voice and classical soundtrack of string instruments are the first sounds we hear as the black background fades into a whitewashed scene of a

“living museum,” which the female voice explains is a repository “where legendary rebels throughout history have been frozen in suspended animation.” This auditory cue, along with the brief visual reference to “the ministry of droids” and “metropolis” in an “official” state seal ties the music video to Monáe’s overarching story-world of rebel alliances and renegade droids. In interviews, Monáe’ describes herself as a time traveler who shares DNA with Mayweather. As the camera pans across a host of urbane museum goers, attired in monochromatic suits and dresses, we see the “Project

Q.U.E.E.N” exhibit, which houses Monáe and The Wondaland Arts Society.

The preponderance of recognizable science fiction tropes in concert with the orchestra of string instruments, antiseptic visual exhibit, and virtual tour guide implies a sterilized future. The vast majority of the exhibit’s visitors are people of color, who exchange knowing glances while observing the spectacle of suspended bodies

142 populating the exhibit. This quickly changes after a covert band of time-traveling rebels frees Monáe, Erykah Badu, and The Wondaland Arts Society, giving agency and the ability to perform their own story. Fittingly, a funk record played on a skull turntable with a gold toothed needle reverses Monáe’s suspended animation. She awakes when the beat drops. The abrupt shift from classical strings to funk-inspired, electric guitar, synthesized 808, bongo drums, and tambourine presents a reparative reading of the future that acknowledges a layered—funk inflected—history, in contrast to the sterility we see and hear at the beginning of the song.

The abrupt sonic shift causes an equally abrupt visual shift in the video. The musical change coincides with a close-up of Monáe’s first movements in which she flutters her eyelashes and subtly tips an empty teacup to spill invisible tea. This image of “spilling the tea,” at the beginning of the video, accompanied by references to ball culture through quick voguing movements and subsequent lyrics of “throwing shade,” and “serving face,” hint at the queer aesthetic sensibilities that shape her artistic expression. Monáe further advances this expression with the coy inquiry: “Is it weird to like the way she wears her tights?” To be sure, Monáe presents this question amid a group of identically attired women. With this image, Monáe queers the undertones of smoldering sexuality in the video while acknowledging the host of similarly, and often identically, attired people of color who respond to her entreats and exclamations with a mix of affirmation and defiance. This community of like-minded, diversely figured people of color stands in for her audience and representative citizens of her audiotopic community or story-world.

Monáe’s brand of performance is heavily influenced by emotive, lyrical, instrumental, and visual flourishes that evoke a sense of call and response. Her

143 performance also challenges the delegitimizing strictures of respectability politics.

During “Q.U.E.E.N.’s” chorus, Monáe references the racialized narrative of decency and civilized propriety by asking her listeners “Am I a freak for dancing round?/ Am I a freak for getting down?” The compounded questions in the lyrics frame her performance and juxtapose the images of dancing bodies with other sensational representations of Black performance. As Francesca Royster notes “[d]ance and music are both metaphors for creative freedom to be protected, and the tools to protect creative freedom” (189). Together, the lyrics and video espouse rebellion and embrace the sense of agency that uninhibited, free movement and self-affirmation provides for marginalized Black folx. Monáe /Mayweather offers simultextual evidence for this reading in her question/call “is it peculiar that she twerks in the mirror?” and her protective affirmation/response “[e]ven if it makes others uncomfortable, I will love who I am” (Monáe)

In representing Mayweather’s fugitive narrative through visual and sonic performance in “Q.U.E.E.N.” and throughout her artistic concept albums, Monáe also queers the look and sound of creative knowledge-work. Her visual performance of

Mayweather’s futuristic post-human Black body compliments the nuanced sonic representation of afrofuturist audiotopia—even as it challenges the aural histories that silence Black sonic representation and advance essentialized symbols of queer identity and embodiment in popular culture. Together, Monáe’s visual and sonic performances advance an artistic movement and a strategy for creative worldbuilding that affirm the

144 future of women’s agency and discursive power through what Shana Redmond describes as “creative uses of the Black body.”151

Monáe’s sonic vision is embodied, queer, and unapologetically Black. Through her concept albums, she creates a simultextual narrative that disrupts generic conventions and questions bounded, exploitative, visions of Black futures. To be clear,

Monáe’s work speaks to past silences in whitewashed U.S history and present practices in a music industry that privileges white, cis-hetero, capitalist, imperialist patriarchal values. Her work exposes these silences and undermines these values by realizing a future world in which Black queer artistry and imaginative self-expression are integral to creative knowledge-work.

The Dissertation as Creative Knowledge-Work

I argue that Monáe’s worldbuilding also models practices that can help us reimagine doctoral work through the dissertation genre. Thus far in this chapter, I’ve examined Monáe’s worldbuilding through her communal creative efforts in The

Wondaland Arts Society, her afrofuturist concept album Electric Lady, and her collaborative single “Q.U.E.E.N.” I’ve also offered a close reading of Q.U.E.E.N’s emotion picture. An in-depth analysis of Monáe’s more recent Dirty Computer

151 Shana Redmond’s examines Monae’s signification on the prevailing historical narratives of the red scare and McCarthyism; in particular, she analyzes Monae’s “Cold War” video and its references to African American women’s history, including the civil rights violations and struggles that often contrasted prevailing anti-communist propaganda during the 1940s and 50s. At base, Redmond reads the “Cold War” video as Monae’s effort to present (and perform) “alternative worldviews” for twenty–first century black women. Redmond suggests that “[t]he lived experiences of and narratives by the African-descended are often replayed and reimagined in and through performance, and black women in particular have a tradition of representing and resisting the conditions of their lives through creative uses of the black body” (393).

145 concept album and accompanying feature-length emotion picture are beyond the scope of this dissertation project; still, Monáe’s creative knowledge-work helps shape how I see, hear, and feel potential options for culminating doctoral projects in afrofuturist studies and other related fields. In this chapter’s concluding section, I look at the dissertation project as a formative and summative artifact that serves a clear, critical, pedagogical purpose and affirms creative knowledge-work. But first, I offer a final bit of context for ongoing efforts to reform academic world-building through the dissertation, which the Modern Language Association Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature (MLA Task Force) describes as “the pivot point for change in doctoral education” (14).

In their 2014 report, the MLA’s Task Force critiques a host of unsustainable practices that support hierarchized knowledge-work both in literary studies and in the humanities. The report also challenges a form of disciplinary worldbuilding that measures the “capstone for graduate study” against a traditional rubric of “book-length project[s]”—even when many faculty, students, and administrative stakeholders agree that “[t]here need not be only a single way to gain depth, expertise, scope, and credentials” in a given academic field of study (11). As an alternative, the Task Force turns to public humanities approaches for “reimagining the dissertation.” The report reminds us that

Projects in the public humanities frequently combine scholarship, teaching, and creative activity; they are often collaborative, engage with diverse communities, sometimes as cocreators, and consciously articulate their value to their publics. And today, the ability to challenge received notions of authorship and to bring our work to different and larger publics outside the academy is amplified by digital networks and social media…Many of our doctoral students consider their scholarship a public good and are finding ways to take their work to the public; they require the ability to speak in different scholarly voices to different audiences, including publics outside of the academy (116).

146 The references to public humanities and creative activity highlight the need for “non- traditional projects” that better reflect sustainable futures in which traditional research- focused tenure-track positions are not the sole outcome of doctoral study.152 In these futures, doctoral students participate in academic worldbuilding practices that de- center the prevalent focus on tenure-track positions and honor public-facing projects— both within and without the academy. Still, the dissertation genre often complicates these efforts through a curious adherence to traditional form and function.

The MLA Task Force Report’s Appendix shares non-traditional approaches from select literature and language departments across the U.S. that reimagine curricular frameworks and assessment models for doctoral education. Some include accelerated course timelines and expanded opportunities for academic professionalization and interdisciplinary graduate course offerings. Others focus on pedagogical training through mentor-based teaching and learning opportunities. But most pay little attention to the summative “capstone project” that often represents a doctoral student’s formative knowledge work. This creates a paradox in which doctoral students are encouraged to perpetuate what the MLA Task Force describes as traditional “notions of authorship” and scholarship in programs that imagine—and otherwise support—“non-traditional” doctoral studies. Amy Lueck and Beth Boehm address this paradox from the perspective of English Literature faculty in their thoughtful response to the Report. They suggest that we reimagine the dissertation committee instead of focusing “on the product or form the dissertation takes” (138).

The core of their argument holds that “we are not encouraging innovative, tradition-

152 The MLA Task Force’s report identifies expanded dissertation options as “non- traditional projects,” which in many ways affirms the centrality and tradition of the monograph dissertation.

147 challenging dissertations because we have not yet developed the theoretical and material structures to support the work on dissertation committees” (138).

Although I am particularly interested in the dissertation artifact—or

“product”—as a simultextual expression of creative knowledge-work, I agree with

Lueck and Boehm’s suggestion to re-think the dissertation committee as collective taste makers who affirm expertise and help shape future academic praxis. I add that the dissertation committee also plays a crucial role in larger academic worldbuilding, as it responds to doctoral capstone projects that deconstruct problematic borders surrounding scholarly success and expertise. As Lueck and Boehm argue “[e]xpanding our conception of expertise allows students to engage with multiple professional role models and mentors who can shape their scholarly identities and research questions, leading to rich and innovative research in and outside the academy” (147). Speaking from the intersecting positions of graduate student, instructional designer, and educator-scholar, I read Lueck and Boehm’s expanded vision as an essential part of reimagining the dissertation project.

In response, I submit this afrofuturist dissertation project as a type of academic

“concept album” both in response to the MLA Task Force and Lueck and Boehm’s call to reimagine doctoral work. This project offers an example of what afrofuturist creative knowledge work looks, sounds, and feels like. As I mention in Chapter 4, afrofuturist creative knowledge work is not a one size fit all proposition; it is an imaginatively capacious approach to inclusive worldbuilding effort that advances the

Black critical imaginary. In the introduction, I discuss constructing each chapter in this project as an independent part of a connected whole. This is not an accident; it is my nod to the concept album and Monáe’s efforts to expand its traditional form via her

148 capacious afrofuturist vision. My experiences with traditional doctoral study motivate me to rethink the process, form, and purpose of this dissertation project. These experiences also push me to share some of the lived experiences that inform each chapter’s creative knowledge-work.

This project’s introductory chapter, “afrofuturist change agents,” began as a dissertation proposal nearly a decade ago. It came out of my early attempts to grapple with utopia, The Frankfurt School, and the problematic silence of Black voices in canonical utopic visions of the future. I initially understood afrofuturism as a “cultural aesthetic” that created a generative space for the Black critical imaginary. Only later did I see afrofuturism’s capacity for shaping change through interventive creative knowledge work.

At the end of Chapter 3, I reference Sheree Renée Thomas’s call for a vision of afrofuturism that connects art-work with political-work and activist-work (40). During the same roundtable discussion, Reynaldo Anderson affirms Thomas’s vision with a word of caution. He warns:

Students, be careful not to reproduce what you’ve been erroneously taught, especially in terms of discourses about art and social life. For example, if you want to critique Black futurity, you don’t need The Frankfurt School to make your argument. The Frankfurt School was antiblack in its formation (42).

It’s difficult to contextualize utopian studies without acknowledging The Frankfurt

School, but this dissertation project has endeavored to de-center canonical white figures who often ignore historical afrofuturist works.153 While this project’s

153 See recent counter-visions of Black speculative imagination that Alex Zamalin traces in Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019) and Isiah Lavender III explores in Afrofuturist Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (2019)

149 introductory chapter offers a brief conceptual genealogy of utopian studies, the remainder of this project purposely privileges queer, Black imaginative terrain.

I came out as a queer, Black man at the start of my doctoral studies. To this day, I remember the fear, uncertainty, and longing that accompanied that public, emergent act. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of

Sand, Dhalgren, and The Motion of Light in Water introduced me to the intellectual and political realities of queer Black folx who imagine fantastic worlds. These texts— and the literary criticism that engaged with them—also showed me how academic and personal concerns can inhabit the same embodied space. This dissertation’s second chapter, “Queer Afrofuturism: Utopia, Sexuality, and Desire in Samuel Delany’s

‘Aye, and Gomorrah’” grew out of a series of self-encounters—through presentations at the Popular Culture Association, and the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. In many ways, the chapter’s critical framing of utopic queerscapes in

Delany’s short story emboldened and sustained me through painful feedback, revisions, and eventual submission to the Utopian Studies journal.

The article took five years to complete, from the first conference presentation in 2012 to publication in 2017. It’s important to name the often-underacknowledged time, life-labor, and various forms of capital that support and hinder creative knowledge-work in academic spaces. I would argue that it’s especially important for

Black and queer folx who must also use critical imagination to—often literally—write themselves into predominantly white, heteronormative spaces inside and outside of the academy. Chapter 2 represents some of that work.

This project’s third chapter, “Igniting the Recognition: Race and the Undead

City in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One” began two years after starting chapter two. By

150 that time in my doctoral studies, I’d begun technical support and training work for two large consumer technology companies outside of the doctoral program. This work supplemented my graduate teaching stipend and helped pay for shelter, food, transportation, and occasional restorative recreation; it also paid for conference fees.

The juggling act was both difficult and illuminating. I learned what critical listening looked and felt like in a variety of transactional environments. The work pushed me to find footing in a complex web of exploitative policies, capitalist consumption, and technological innovation. The work also required that I witness and participate in systems that encouraged persistent economic precarity in a variety of urban, suburban, and ex-urban environments.

I completed Chapter 3 after reflecting on the relationship between precarity and critical imagination. The chapter allowed me to examine the ways memory, expertise, and social maps are constructed in Zone One’s precarious urban environment. Whitehead’s text artfully depicts a world in which a Black protagonist deconstructs post-apocalyptic utopic visions while adapting to the realities of persistent precarity. It’s often difficult for doctoral students to finish and share their creative knowledge-work when they must deal with the material realties of devalued labor, trivialized time commitments, and inadequate funding. These realties help institutionalize various forms of precarity in academic spaces. For many Black folx, doctoral studies re-enact the systemic devaluation of Black labor that pervades exploitative capitalist “markets” throughout the US—from service industry job postings to MLA jobs lists. Chapter 3 examines the systems we remember and

(re)create when those markets—and their attendant social maps—are destroyed. The chapter also points to the ways afrofuturism can help us rethink exploitative labor and

151 space-making practices—while embracing collective, ethical urban planning and social justice in urban spaces.

This project’s penultimate chapter, “A Lasting Truth: Octavia Butler’s

Afrofuturist Pedagogy and Digital Learning Praxis” was written from a place of frustration. I began the chapter in earnest after deciding to pursue positions outside of the tenure-track. My initial inclination was to leave academia altogether. Before

Chapter 2 was accepted for publication in 2017, I juggled multiple labor relationships.

These involved holding consistent in-home tutoring appointments with high school and middle school students, maintaining scheduled weekend and evening hours at “big box” technology stores, teaching additional courses as an adjunct at a local college, in addition to other—more rewarding—academic labor outside of expected teaching and writing duties. I also participated in a variety of paid experiments with a range of requirements, from dietary restrictions to micro dialysis—all while presenting papers on Black futures, discussing theories of socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and fishing for conversation topics at expensive conference hotels.

As I noted in Chapter 4, the bleak depiction of problematic educational realities are not meant to overshadow the opportunities for professionalization and financial support I’ve received through award-winning projects like The Colored

Conventions Project. I support the multimodal community-building models such projects offer for future graduate study in the humanities. I also want to acknowledge the work that happens outside of department guidelines and positions outside of these projects, along with the frustration such work causes for change-oriented folx who must grapple with the realities of devalued labor.

152 Doctoral students in humanities programs are often afforded the opportunity to practice critical analysis, research, and multimodal composition. Some programs also help doctoral students develop a reflective teaching and learning practice. However, few programs encourage deep reflection or collective organizing around the challenges and costs of creative knowledge-work in decontextualized teaching and learning spaces. Chapter 4 approaches this worldbuilding practice through Octavia

Butler’s work. The chapter references “The Book of Martha” and Fledgling as pedagogical blueprints in which Black womxn fight to contextualize their lived experiences and embrace mutual accountability in educational spaces. I argue that these texts offer principles for a framework of afrofuturist instructional design, which educator-scholars can use to redefine the parameters of learning and its relationship to technology, time, public engagement, and imaginative queer, Black pedagogical praxis.

This dissertation project is an act of queer Black pedagogical praxis that looks to afrofuturism for imaginative change. Its concluding chapter interrogates the preciousness of the dissertation genre in much the same way Colson Whitehead deconstructs the artificial “challenge of marrying intellectual and literary substance with pop culture” in his conversation with Jeremy Keehn.154 If, as Whitehead argues,

“the world is a junkyard” that supports art which “can speak to different generations, cultures, contexts” and “live beyond the time of its creation” this project’s conclusion represents a broader push to “recognize the equivalency of cultural forms” (Keehn).

As such, this project’s creative knowledge-work is more than a carefully constructed collection of critical concepts; it’s a funky simultext that’s—at times—purposefully

154 See Chapter 3’s epigraph.

153 non-traditional and defiantly irreverent; and, like Monáe’s work, it also tells a story, for those who read and listen aright.

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161 Jackson, Sandra; Moody-Freeman, Julie. The Black Imagination: Science-Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative. New York, NY: Peter Lang. 2011.

Johnston, Georgia. “Discourses of Autobiographical Desires: Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon Series.” Biography. Vol.30. 2007. pp 48-60.

Kilgore, De W. D. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

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Lavender, Isiah. Race in American Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

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Marin, Louis. "Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present." Critical Inquiry. Vol. 19.3. 1993. pp 397.

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Plante, Jacqueline. “In the Spirit of Process: A Braiding Together of New Utopianism, Gilles Deleuze, and Anne Carson.” The Influence of Imagination : Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy as Agents of Social Change, McFarland & Co, 2007 Rieder, John. “Life Writing and Science Fiction: Constructing Identities and Constructing Genres.” Biography, Vol. 30.1. pp v-xvii. 2007.

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162 Siebers, Tobin. Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic. Ann Arbor MI: U. Michigan Press, 1994.

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- “The Necessity of Models, of Alternatives: Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 109. 2. (2010): 249- 278. Print.

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Chapter 3 References

Anderson, Renaldo and Charles E. Jones. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro Blackness. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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163 Barber, Tiffany. 25 Years of Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Thought: Roundtable with Tiffany E. Barber, Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, and Sheree Renée Thomas. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Vol. 39. pp 136-144. 2018

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164 Jablon, Madelyn. Black Metafiction: Self-consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

Keehn, Jeremy. “Zone One: Six Questions for Colson Whitehead.” Harpers. N.p., 17 Oct. 2011. 11 September 2019.

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Chapter 4 References

Bale, Jeff, and Sarah Knopp. Education and Capitalism : Struggles for Learning and Liberation. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2012. hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge, 2010.

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165

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Bailey, Moya, et al. “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Palimpsests in the Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler.” Palimpsest : a Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International., vol. 6, no. 1, SUNY Press, 2017, pp. v–xiii, doi:10.1353/pal.2017.0014.

Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations On Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2005.

Jamieson, Ayana. “Why Should You Read Sci-Fi Superstar Octavia E. Butler.” Ted Education Series, 2019. youtu.be/X6YI8lsjJJA.

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Dick, Philip K, and Bruce Jensen. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

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Gaskins, Nettrice. “Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space.” Afrofuturism 2.0: the Rise of Astro-Blackness /, Lexington Books, an imprint of the Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.,, 2016.

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166 Coffman, Teresa. Inquiry-based Learning: Designing Instruction to Promote Higher Level Thinking. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017

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168 Larson, Rob. Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2020

Anderson, Monica, et al. “Activism in the Social Media Age.” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, Pew Research Center, 31 Dec. 2019, www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/07/11/activism-in-the-social-media-age/.

Cottom, Tressie Macmillan. “Digital Sociologies” University of Richmond Faculty Learning Community Speaker Series, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x93JwMMM04.

Wenzel, Andrea. “Curious Communities: Online Engagement Meets Old-School, Face-to-Face Outreach.” Columbia Journalism Review, 25 May 2017, www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/curious-communities-online-engagement- meets-old-school-face-to-face-outreach.php.

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Salvaggio, Ruth. “Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 18, no. 2, 1984, pp. 78–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2904131. Accessed 28 Mar. 2017.

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Brox, Ali. “‘Every Age Has the Vampire It Needs’: Octavia Butler's Vampiric Vision in Fledgling.” Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2008, pp. 391–409. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20719918. Accessed 28 Mar. 2020.

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Thomas, Jamie A., and Christina Jackson. Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse, Lexington Books, an imprint of the Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2019.

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169 Shelley Streeby. “Speculative Archives: Histories of the Future of Education.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2014, pp. 25–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/pacicoasphil.49.1.0025. Accessed 30 Mar. 2017.

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Alexander, Bryant Keith. “Embracing the Teachable Moment: The Black Gay Body in the Classroom as Embodied Text.” Black Queer Studies : a Critical Anthology, Duke University Press, 2005.

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170 brown, adrienne maree, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change and Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017

Morris, Sean Michael. “An Upsurge of Questioning and Critique: toward a Community of Critical Pedagogy” Sean Michael Morris, Sean Michael Morris, 25 Apr. 2018, https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/an-upsurge-of-questioning- and-critique-toward-a-community-of-critical-pedagogy/.

Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam, 1989

Harris, David. “Rhizomatic Education and Deleuzian Theory.” Open Learning., vol. 31, no. 3, Carfax International Publishers, Sept. 2016, pp. 219–32, doi:10.1080/02680513.2016.1205973.

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Earhart, Amy. “Can Information be Unfettered?: Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon.” Debates In the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

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Jetter, Mary and Montgomery, Mary Lynn. ““I Am From” Activity Guide: A Tool to Foster Student Interaction in the Classroom.” University of Minnesota Global Programs and Strategy Alliance. Minneapolis: Minnesota. June 2016 https://global.umn.edu/icc/documents/I_Am_From_Faculty_Guide.pdf.

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Blum, Susan Debra. "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press, 2016

Cottom, Tressie McMillan. Thick: and Other Essays. New York: The New Press, 2019

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Woodson, Carter Godwin. The Mis-education of the Negro. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990

Schalk, Samantha Dawn. Bodyminds Reimagined: (dis)ability, Race, and Gender In Black Women's Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018

Pickens, Therí A. Black Madness :: Mad Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019

Chapter 5 References

Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005

Keeling, Kara, and Josh Kun. Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

Anderson, Reynaldo. "Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto." Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, vol. 42, no. 1-2, 2016, p. 228+. Gale General OneFile, https://link-gale- com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/apps/doc/A485936633/ITOF?u=upenn_main&si d=ITOF&xid=961780b3. Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.

Hassler-Forest, Dan. Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World- Building Beyond Capitalism. 2016.

Redmond, Shana L. “This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe’s ‘Cold War.’” Journal of Popular Music Studies., vol. 23, no. 4, Taylor & Francis, Jan. 2011

Berman, Russell Et al. “Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature” MLA. May 2014 https://apps.mla.org/pdf/taskforcedocstudy2014.pdf

172 Lueck, Amy J., and Beth Boehm. "Beginning at the End: Reimagining the Dissertation Committee, Reimagining Careers." Composition Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2019, p. 135+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link-gale- com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/apps/doc/A585355302/AONE?u=upenn_main&s id=AONE&xid=b7eda6fd. Accessed 20 Dec. 2019

Zamalin, Alex. Black Utopia: the History of an Idea From Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019

Lavender, Isiah. Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019

173 Appendix A

SOUNDSCAPES

A.1 Chapter 1 Soundscape (listed in order of appearance)

Jill Scott. “Warm up.” Words and Sounds Vol. II, Hidden Beach, 2004, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4BRLvMRkas2dOv00f0Byx2?si=sDlzwvPVR WyXXHCHe0cJdw

Solange. “Can I Hold the Mic (interlude).” When I Get Home, Columbia Records, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6b6LmQZz9yeMnFQDFWQa5E?si=TjdTTLjlT 76o1GprdDFRUw

April + Vista. “Hot Coffee Freestyle.” You Are Here, Otherfeels Recordings, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5u9pEcEfMrUcDU1SggFQAX?si=7oE3xDRX R3mDowHtqHyohg

Solange. “Things I Imagined” When I Get Home, Columbia Records, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0jF4xsiVd8AQoIEUmn7KLt?si=uEZMV3YhS Gy_V7u4tDy_vQ

Janelle Monae. “Suite II Overture.” The ArchAndroid, Bad Boy Records, 2010, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4J4doCpLNS2wBif1EHSu0L?si=LBxb4f0qR1- AqQub6pBuAA

Sarah Vaughan. “How High the Moon.” Sarah Vaughan: Live at Mister Kelly’s Chicago, UMG Recordings, 1957, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1gy9t9dkS1aT3P05h9WU2f?si=I82V1SuERb62 ryJ5g19YPA

Erykah Badu. “Didn’t Cha Know.” Mama’s Gun, Motown, 2000, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/7pv80uUHfocFqfTytu1MVi

Sun Ra Arkestra. Door to the Cosmos. Sleeping Beauty, El Saturn Records, 1979, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3N6CeY1NWCzqsVyNtxbVxu?si=B- DO-q9vSYy2AOm02eX-Xw

Nao. “Voice Memo 162.” For All We Know, RCA Records, 2016, Spotify

174 https://open.spotify.com/track/4hhKtWh8y1dnwEHJU9X1WJ?si=FrxnhlOfRo SN4eMZFdEBwA

Hiatus Kaiyote. The Lung. Choose Your Weapon, Flying Buddha, 2015, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/track/45GTuMUP3lNuZcw7MGKfhx?si=P11nXABG RViWS5EwB1Dahg

Hakim Nick. “I Don’t Know.” Where Will We Go, Pt. 2, Earseed Records, 2014, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6ejOqrr7r2LcUDxIqZyygp?si=jPvs-x- LTKWluyLVllfouw

Moses Sumney. “Don’t Bother Calling.” Aromanticism, JagJaguwar, 2017, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5dqNCR3ANsOIMeQLpk54wU?si=Z0lyzpJiQd uk6BATIS-eyQ

Alabama Shakes. “Sound & Color.” Sound & Color. 2015, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/65wx71brAmEQz66GXXF8gI?si=i5- 3n1Q5RE6ADnKa6NFb1g

The Midnight Hour. “Questions.” The Midnight Hour, Linear Labs, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1Rd3q29I4tEwQKQudWh0Jd?si=a6kN3VUGS OyRC3QoDvw0uw

D’Angelo. “Send It On.” Voodoo. Virgin, 2000, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5LIwaG8Wl9LfExcmiRQm7J?si=B8bBZccwSj GSjqOqvj6fHw

Maxwell. “Gestation: Mythos.” Embrya, 1998, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2QUrEQ0tYJKXIKUDx17blI?si=IQOl0GxXSe ac2GTw8FCKtA

Black Coffee. “Intro.” Pieces Of Me. UMG, 2015, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6MqLHm5QSSaBNc5LqUQIso?si=g5o8x95iQ 0uQqDizXv5myA

A.2 Chapter 2 Soundscape (listed in order of appearance)

Janelle Monae, “Suite III Overture.” The ArchAndroid, 2010, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4M1sI8PeQsSDQJWQXtDzWV?si=cXsFhDYLR 9-Hk44ZJpCBiw

Roman GianArthur, “I-69.” I-69, The Wondaland Arts Society, 2013, Spotify,

175 https://open.spotify.com/track/1I5HjhrlhbWLlKIHwa0qMy?si=3YTof_3rQpiW OVBAZeqgew

Bilal, “Back To Love.” Back To Love, eOne Music, 2012, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1B3TWaCE8tgXnC8f6c7w3E?si=NTdcsAXFQ3 uevFTB3Yi12A

The Roots, “Possibility (2nd Movement).” Undun, Def Jam, 2011, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5DPtraumV3W2f94xdierwQ?si=sqzSFhe4QpO7I fy2moDO0w

Frank Ocean. “Pink + White.” Blonde, Boys Don’t Cry, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3xKsf9qdS1CyvXSMEid6g8?si=ZQ98ZzZhSDKt Wrazr0WVqA

Stevie Wonder. “The First Garden.” Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants,” Tamla, 1979, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2nMEzUpgojXx10jLWT30RX?si=VDdxFe7vRx- 88936ohxExQ

Nao. “Drive and Disconnect.” Saturn, RCA, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6pEAd0UjznaKABT7WLLvmC?si=wNNeVb4Y SlyFR28DyWgEuw

Brandy. Like This. Full Moon, Atlantic, 2002, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2kTtJMSbOJOEMpfXVy3PRX?si=Wz- FavXmQYyZ9zm0HDIacQ

Emily King. Can’t Hold Me. Scenery, ATO, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6xTertkFt7J2engKnDaR9u?si=Y3Y7maHnTlupZ G8e_PLimQ

D’Angelo. One Mo’Gin. Voodoo. Virgin, 2000, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4KdHmcUVArJeN7XPjp6Czx?si=81la87OmSni5 MtKFog3CLg

Earth Wind & Fire. “In the Marketplace (Interlude).” Columbia Records, All ‘n All, 1977, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5sz00JY0sDJHdK6R2x3BRM?si=alFF_TQqR46 b8_kCiDgOXg

H.E.R. “Focus.” H.E.R Volume 1, RCA, 2016, Spotify,

176 https://open.spotify.com/track/3tZs3nVjySLbL320lP4mvs?si=YzOzbz4PTiqNIt vSQaa3iA

Nao. “Orbit.” Saturn, RCA, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5yrXolC7Un3peiFxwqbucn?si=ggwisVoiRm6jfX 6Bld2d0w

Chantae Cann. “Craters.” Sol Empowered, Atlanta Records, 2017, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0mPoGnpycgOzpAftQol7W7?si=gWypc3azRL2 Mi4tSAFXnXA

Poetry Man. “Poetry Man.” Pheobe Snow, Shelter Records, 1974, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5uhULfoDgTvz7BeWlqrV4a?si=CZxBC0W4QIa 8nnYz7jksaw

Anderson .Paak. “Come Home.” Ventura, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6RpunyUP44SDweJPDScLSF?si=kj4wBG_USM WOgzzAYfa6Hw

Cautious Clay. “Cold War.” Cold War (Stripped), Cautious Clay, 2017, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6DwiGVCgXGREeCyJZtX7S1?si=Ijzx5dSaTzi 9LFmw6cADvg

Masego, Tiffany Gouche. Queen Tings. EQT Recordings, UMG, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5tkR9JkBj3Ueeo8W4k8IZD?si=Qri2azwWS8u 2hwV7cFoLTg

Grace Jones. “Private Life.” Warm Leatherette, UMG, 1980, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4qJUooADlW9fJEsinSNYko?si=tIiFRu1VTSu VpqvGg8Sofg

Erykah Badu. “Window Seat.” New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), Universal Motown, 2010, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/74HYrIbnpc2xKCTenv5qKM?si=0OQrv20LS6 ab3nzVzbWRQg

The Internet. “Wanna Be.” Hive Mind, Columbia, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5GjisoOfsN8qagrax01T4y?si=22IaHghETbCR QcFQC1FBlA

Gabriel Garzon-Montano. “Fruitflies.” Jardin, Stones Throw Records, 2017, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4AyF3otW64PCw45b1ENW77?si=xnMJpmYV RNmMemTXwRYSJw

177

Rihanna. “Desperado.” ANTI, Westbury Road Entertainment, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4mCf3vQf7z0Yseo0RxAi3V?si=JmumbLikRre ZpjJ7yIej8A

Janelle Monae. Don’t Judge Me. Dirty Computer, Bad Boy Records, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6UQDIIEPzeduwXlZE86SOF?si=HmkVrnyNSOq4Gf UQKM28LQ

A.3 Chapter 3 Soundscape (listed in order of appearance)

Mereba. “more.” The Jungle Is The Only Way Out, Interscope, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1LRiOeMh6MwBDN8ZwOPWix?si=yJzkwg25 RBiV0zLJGChV8w.

Moor Mother. “Creation Myth.” Fetish Bones, Don Giovanni, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/67Av5oswszM8mErRFZoE2a?si=PHQ1qTotSF OGHZx19GS56g.

Marvin Gaye. “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” What’s Going On, Motown, 2001, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2uDRWoTx7I5mbk6suCYvBo?si=DsTNgtw6R K-pgo68VouTvw.

Janelle Monáe. “Jane’s Dream.” Dirty Computer, Bad Boy Records, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0GJZUWxQrzAOvFzqyxK9ng?si=wbaaedTHT Guf_zot79BmHg.

Thunder Cat. “Them Changes.” Drunk, Brainfeeder, 2017, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/7CH99b2i1TXS5P8UUyWtnM?si=hzylHv5hT8 Sq4RC6R-FEKw.

Kamasi Washington. “Street Fighter Mas.” Heaven and Earth, Shoto Mas, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2kTWcP2fid9TKLdcRuiAq4?si=cpDiAyU5R1 GTHn8x904Qxw.

Amel Larrieux. “Trapped Being Human.” Ice Cream Everyday, Blisslife Records, 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3zmbKTTNoOTShf4jheUuBs?si=1Cyomws7Sh msZ2BKZsr8Jg.

178 Brandy. “A Capella (Something’s Missing).” Human, Sony Music, 2008, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/55J2bUZcl0XZ9NxYp8acU7?si=VHwy_lHwRi OJEUETrYHDwA.

Emily King. “The Animals.” The Switch (Deluxe Edition),” Making Music Records, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4ICcaVF9mCJIinNLqAd0R2?si=uuiIwB_CSge QPF9rmXUgDA.

Robert Glasper Experiment. “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Black Radio, Blue Note Records, 2012, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5SmYRW8JySpZnsg0yzEFR5?si=4HORkoL1Q IKZ2y6VyUyMTA.

Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar. “Never Catch Me.” You’re Dead!, Warp Records, 2014, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6CTG85NJI1Wm60pxTSRNwL?si=MxgFAXr ZTPKLJNiMtevsbw.

Floston Paradigm. “The Memory of You.” The Electric Fields EP, KingBrittArchives, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0ptoGCTycH10zBImNDl3N3?si=jA6LzmhBSk mhKS6kuiZpIg.

Janelle Monáe, The Wondaland ArchOrchestra. “Suite IV Electric Overture.” The Electric Lady, 2013, Bad Boy Records, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/74M3xchD6iD3asnCuhsrIn?si=O73pOxlhQDm KJ6TUo2nIwA.

Donnie. “Big Black Buck.” The Colored Section, Motown, 2002, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1AhQWJdSRNYsiDCMMAbeEn?si=GtAf87tV Q7-Ww6ZC46nM0A.

Beyoncé. “Daddy Lessons.” Lemonade, Parkwood Entertainment, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/71OvX5NNLrmz7rpq1ANTQn?si=QIKXl3VG QsGzmF3y9Du3wg.

Janelle Monáe. “Neon Gumbo.” The ArchAndroid, Bad Boy Records, 2010, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1Wv14r1lFyrCJVhe36iHWq?si=8cs7kTD- R2mnrrQAkD_cOA.

Solange. “Cranes in The Sky.” A Seat at The Table, Columbia, 2016, Spotify,

179 https://open.spotify.com/track/48EjSdYh8wz2gBxxqzrsLe?si=gnchW4nkQ3a AAOJ_c1JRZw.

Donny Hathaway. “The Ghetto.” Everything Is Everything, Atlantic, 1970, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1yeIxOEFmpQ3qlOb2R3g2m?si=0fqZ2GvhTfq TOfPfHXTvAA.

Roberta Flack. “Tryin’ Times.” First Take, Atlantic Record Corp., 1995, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5wNo8LEPPEs9HSYh0A63CB?si=XhhXsUEH TQmZ0SLgc84mPA.

Aretha Franklin. “A Bridge over Troubled Water.” Soul Queen, Rhino Entertainment Corp., 2007, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3MGNretkjfPdtL1YfZY34Z?si=D4qFEUIPSSi- SZuY8RBUuw.

India.Arie. “SoulBird Outro: Clarinet.” SongVersation, IndiaArie Inc., 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4Qgp1zgWyidAaHLVf6rDgT?si=sX7nY3POSti lOpn_Vxw5-A.

A.4 Chapter 4 Soundscape (listed in order of appearance)

Donnie. “Welcome To The Colored Section.” The Colored Section, Motown, 2003, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/78J3y8rFVp6SZI3k3Npe4s?si=ycX8aO rLTbWH4bW8fID4hw.

Ms. Lauryn Hill. “Intro.” The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, Ruffhouse Records, 1998, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/34QTgJPSf9Nvpw3NrlX8pu?si=2Oqbs wzBTtG-AlKJe6qVCg.

Kamasi Washington. “Fists Of Fury.” Heaven And Earth, Shoto Mas, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/66gLiXgY4hOU18P5E3lbWD?si=9j_XNgW8T O-4-CcaxGnvhQ.

Emily King. “Out Of Clouds.” The Switch (Deluxe Edition),” Making Music Records, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0R9sH6IjG1XuFp1tRjmtmL?si=HultvFlyTKai B_TnNji2qg.

Janelle Monáe, Brian Wilson. “Dirty Computer (feat. Brian Wilson).” Dirty Computer,

180 Bad Boy Records, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/7nJZ9LplJ3ZAyhQyJCJk0K?si=BMuVivvKRP 2-nzSF7MLU6g.

Jamila Woods. “OCTAVIA.” Legacy! Legacy!, Jagjaguwar, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0e3DXXdAtmsQzCcJTjEDgy?si=nvkGzMFhT dOOJpeB811t6Q.

April + Vista. “Every Void.” Every Void, April + Vista, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/26qXWXW2MUQ9xmZ7D9JGZ7?si=ytc0kfJH TVq5Y0Whn-8w_Q.

Jill Scott. “Watching Me.” Who Is Jill Scott? Words And Sounds, Vol. 1, Hidden Beach, 2000, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3hurvlwdXcUva5R8ngDs6H?si=5BFtb077SQe PD7dU1eZ_Mw.

Bilal. “Satellites.” In Another Life, Entertainment One Music, 2015, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6bVbainVudDb9NIwb69Y9N?si=Ah_moGYvT RSfbx07zjwCFA.

Nick Hakim. “Vincent Taylor.” Vincent Taylor, ATO Records, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6uPVRZB9GYljJ52fmlIlUC?si=KX9IopUoSGi VA6oM8PA4Sg.

Ibeyi. “River.” Ibeyi, XL Recordings, 2015, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1wFIjJSHobXpNDbSfe8Gdb?si=x8zCRSWbS2 6A7tMHoLI-Ng.

Yebba. “Evergreen.” Evergreen, YEBBA, 2017, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4UuwnKoOKWYYnerZKZMtvD?si=QT4Bcc0 mQRi-abuqi6ktXw.

India.Arie. “SoulBird Interlude: Trombone.” SongVersation, IndiaArie, Inc., 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1RxnKwEbi4s4wsHVLhYyuP?si=XHIi 2bw9TaO7Ay4xBngNeg.

The Walls Group, Brandy. “God On My Mind (feat. Brandy).” Fast Forward, Fo Yo Soul Recordings, 2014, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3TircWUhmJCUAOonyKi8Sl?si=6Xj- pqGFRrSnAawic5N4KQ.

Aretha Franklin. “It Ain't Necessarily So.” Aretha In Person With The Ray Bryant

181 Combo (Expanded Edition), Sony Music, 1961, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0K6w2tpFDfunykh0DO8HCX?si=_j4OKTTYT h-Cm1fzY14uDg.

Quincy Jones. “Summer In The City.” You’ve Got It Bad Girl, The Verve Music Group, 2009, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/39eFFeKv7QaTBIukk7TYVu?si=qK0n0fqsSEa KTqxnInFf9g.

Minnie Riperton. “When It Comes Down To It.” Adventures In Paradise, Capitol Records, 1975, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4clw6ilYxpOiBeoSkJJvSX?si=XJDptx2ASEGE tGTUuHrDIg.

Jazmine Sullivan. “If You Dare.” Reality Show, RCA Records, 2014, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5kJszy7ZLfjh3YOa2TQuFF?si=yLEFM- rVSG6opTLdTNxgmw.

Brandy. “Intro.” Two Eleven (Deluxe Edition), RCA Records, 2012, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5TuDUhGLLyuhioh7jQPhbu?si=1B- 0MLrPTuOV6EgOp4bgkA.

We Are KING. “Hey.” The Story, KING, 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5HkW47BxKNgkW2bSNghlNa?si=gTZYc0b6 QV2QgN1wDSQi-w.

Jazmine Sullivan. “Fear.” Fearless, J Records, 2008, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2CjvtEMujrdHP8iaV5N7oG?si=1vX7GUDAQ Vy72aloQwe-nQ.

BJ The Chicago Kid, Afrojack. “Reach.” 1123 (Deluxe Edition), UMG Recordings, 2019, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1r5ks4SKhRhC2DLu6Vcrtm?si=Cxy42CyDR5 KpPOSsEkjW6A.

Donnie. “Cloud 9 - Main.” The Colored Section, Motown, 2003, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/7muWyt73NWsGW3aPV1YILN?si=HO1hwGx xTcKHtrNBSUP6xw.

Ms. Lauryn Hill. “Lost Ones.” The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, Ruffhouse Records, 1998, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0x6TCyRm4vmh81Ev0Tvylc?si=r3MQTeUoS7 -AsxAJDC_SwQ.

182

The RH Factor, Q-Tip, Erykah Badu. “Poetry.” Hard Groove, The Verve Music Group, 2003, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3nSECoLmCiUbpQVJtpmS1I?si=VSqOwRi7Q f6j0fG34Eri7g.

Brandy. “Outro.” Two Eleven (Deluxe Edition), RCA Records, 2012, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3MH9W6UabbIMCUALTRzydw?si=5BLIS4Py TgWbDHBPpK0QeQ.

A.5 Chapter 5 Soundscape (listed in order of appearance)

Robert Glasper Experiment. “Baby Tonight - Black Radio 2 Theme/Mic Check 2.” Black Radio 2 (Deluxe), Blue Note Records, 2012, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1uHefom7PWGMl7Omj3jNww?si=MyfpSvIjQ SqWxaCQN1QLIQ

Stevie Wonder. “Sir Duke.” Songs In The Key Of Life, UMG Recordings, 1976, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4pNiE4LCVV74vfIBaUHm1b?si=wYL ZxJFIR1KJ11naqfCLKw

Janelle Monáe. “Good Morning Midnight - Interlude.” The Electric Lady, Bad Boy Records, 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0w3wtwW7jTp40yTzUIX31N?si=UKYBY- 25Rle0rZf7UdAxHA.

Prince. “Musicology.” Musicology, NPG Records, 2004, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/track/3kiKvrMonNxyh8nzkhCrbU?si=UrDSYeFPRJa 9kY6CpDg3-w.

Robert Glasper Experiment, Brandy. “What Are We Doing” Black Radio 2, Blue Note Records, 2012, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0cLMQy53w4KLKDOzchC5fR?si=_PLa3TNr QnqdHX37uVU4xg.

Gil Scott-Heron. “Jazz (Interlude).” I’m New Here (10th Anniversary Expanded Edition), XL Recordings, 2010, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/1I0rJ1a2SoZERLJtc6Sogm?si=7QpwTPnlSiqV UyIFXicxvw.

183 Pearl Bailey. “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” 16 Most Requested Songs, Sony Music, 1991, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3ujLiD5UHZXrqLP5c9y2zY?si=4MfACiW6R LGCjes1c73XJA.

Fats Domino. “Boogie Woogie Baby.” They Call Me The Fat Man (The Legendary Imperial Recordings), Capitol Records, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2wwUoPpCVxlCQYfq3ydPVc?si=UZJLdEo8R Cmn3bmyOeQD0g.

Nat King Cole. “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66.” After Midnight: The Complete Session, Capitol Records, 1999, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0zQ1o6q0QaeMgro248kNGh?si=GONVB1BsR o24VdFiaehWCA.

Donald Byrd. “Blind Man, Blind Man.” Up With Donald Byrd, The Verve Music Group, 1964, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/4wLdWbhPkycPd6qn8dnOsL?si=WCR8IgZcR wqDInVL1GGKPw.

Kamasi Washington. “Ohh Child.” The Choice, Shoto Mas, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/251zBj8PUeedTExIRANZ2n?si=yImJ-gE- TsOnghHtL-1aUA.

Ohio Players. “Funky Worm.” Pleasure, Westbound Records, 1972, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6j6zSLwHRvHpfGCnZ0z55v?si=z7kFu- M0ToKw-l-a3CappQ.

Larry Graham, Graham Central Station. “My Radio Sure Sounds Good to Me.” The Best of Larry Graham & Graham Central Station, Vol. 1, Warner Records, 1996, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2aU3nphEK2vcv0eV4FNIYF?si=GM0N4NLfR 0-G-PD65qFVvA.

Janelle Monáe. “Our Favorite Fugitive - Interlude.” The Electric Lady, Bad Boy Records, 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6ChGbkmmu4wBpIno7eszUv?si=T4GhHwRaT jGKTN5fO6WXxA.

Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu. “Q.U.E.E.N. (feat. Erykah Badu).” The Electric Lady, Bad Boy Records, 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3HW030T8eqPs8wpsgZqCGM?si=S6- itPWOSnGauTNpAU9A6g.

184

Janelle Monáe. “Suite V Electric Overture.” The Electric Lady, Bad Boy Records, 2013, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5vFfy5GH3SrYVtPVf6SVc2?si=Cn29c7_mSm uT0mpJn1lncA.

Rachelle Ferrell. “Individuality (Can I Be Me?).” Individuality (Can I Be Me?), Capitol Records, 2000, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/3hCLnDQqNcf8DbV77f0Upw?si=dGUT9aT7S 9epCxH0sBe6tg.

Lalah Hathaway. “Tragic Inevitability.” Self Portrait, Concord Music Group, 2008, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2dpO0oAtMMZMwhgYkk8bzI?si=DPc yTXxPQTyUxbWjuE78Ow.

Solange, Sampha. “Don’t Touch My Hair (feat. Sampha).” A Seat At The Table, Columbia Records, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2TyCAfhwu5tRqFW8VnGMIL?si=yDRdOBdD QnyTaWda9nVo_g.

April + Vista. “Own2.” You Are Here, Otherfeels Recordings, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5yeLepyINbTDBadOF56V7i?si=gjklLMibQQ6 cgsGsHis5RQ.

Seinabo Sey. “I Owe You Nothing.” I Owe You Nothing / Remember, Saraba AB, 2018, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5oOsdSm13PI3wgSePScW8g?si=6jJhXK4OR0 GkPD8fc7OCMQ.

Emily King. “Aya.” The Switch (Deluxe Edition), Making Music Records, 2016, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6zfeCpQvpT0GvNBYEifvX6?si=Zx68LVIfTJ6 b-IaMOcOsVQ.

Joe Sample, Lalah Hathaway. “A Long Way From Home.” The Song Lives On, PRA Records, 1999, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/5nZmiTxgjv27CP1ZCjYUvf?si=EIr5rRBWRU qhEc1KZ1PsBQ.

The Roots. “Finality (4th Movement).” Undun, The Island Def Jam Music Group, 2011, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2qJzKhIiR965GQASF2uog2?si=3Qa3nhuFTRS 7fM6eKgG3nA.

185

Kim Burrell. “Postlude.” No Ways Tired, Shanachie, 2009, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/2RcbZg8lR54nRbqE00NAdu?si=hQVpmHspTq K8YOEAa2Nqnw.

186