Review by Tiffani J. Smith, California State University, Fullerton
Publisher: The Ohio State University Press, 2024
Length: 130 pages
In Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women’s Fiction, Cassandra L. Jones brings to life a collection of memory work “remembering and recognizing the contribution of Black women and all Black people” (p. 2). Jones turns readers attention to the memory-work in the texts of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Rasheedah Phillips. As Jones and other scholars assert, Black women’s literary “homespaces” function as a “safe space to be themselves” and offers readers spaces to theorize about the past, present, and future (p. 3). The disruption and “intervention” of the “patriarchal, capitalistic, and racist urge to forget” is what Jones coins as “Black speculative feminisms” (p. 2). Black speculative feminisms is visionary fiction that offers new possibilities of re-imagining, questioning, and providing solutions toward a liberated future. Black speculative feminisms allows for the exploration of “real” and fantasy but also make meaning of historical and current traumas often left out or “forgotten” in narratives.
Jones uses Black speculative feminisms to expand Susan M. Morris’s term “Afrofuturist feminism” to include food and ecological justice intersected with Black, Indigenous narrative and technological progress. Black speculative feminisms provides the lens to reimagine connections and solutions to environmental injustice. Jones focuses on Black speculative feminist texts to explore the uses of restorative fabulation. Jones defines restorative fabulation “as an aspect of Black critical imagination or the therapeutic act of imagining liberated Black futures” (p. 6). Restorative fabulation provides alternative possibilities and ways of being in the world. In highlighting Black speculative feminist literature, Jones composes an excellent examination of restorative fabulation in each collection of texts that demystify imagery and canons of healing, intergenerational trauma, and ecological quandaries to reimagine futures for all Black people.
In Chapter One, Jones pinpoints how white horror films such as Skeleton Key and Candyman (1991) use the act of remembering as tools of terror, trauma, and fear. Jones highlights Tananarive Due’s The Good House and Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms to challenge the dominant rhetoric of forgetting in popular culture and literature. Jones explores the ways in which Due and Hopkinson’s use memory and horror as healing. The use of memory as horror and healing in the texts work in opposition to stories of trauma and loss. Jones poignantly pinpoints the importance of the forgetting in each text. On one hand, forgetting contributed to the tragic events in The Good House and fear in The New Moon’s Arms. On the other hand, the Black speculative feminist texts demonstrate how remembering can be transformative in personal, familial, and societal relationships. For instance, the act of conjure in Due and Hopkinson’s text challenges and reclaims histories that have been “stigmatized, diminished, or erased by racist colonial practices and equally reinforced by internalized practices of Black folks in the storytelling of Black women” (p. 21). Jones and Kaamelah L. Martin specify that Black women use the conjure women to represent “rituals of rememory” to heal cultural trauma. Rememory also functions as a source of resilience and can lead to new possibilities of viewing and reimagining in the world. Similarly in both novels, rememory operates as a vehicle to restore interpersonal relationships and identify violence in larger society.
In Chapter Three, Jones highlights the decolonization of time travel in the Black speculative fiction of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Rasheedah Phillip’s Telescope Effect: Part I. Jones pinpoints how Butler’s and Phillip’s utilization of time travel does not happen unilaterally, particularly as it pertains to trauma. Butler and Phillip’s texts invites readers to empathize and assess intergenerational trauma. Both stories occur during slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in the North to shed light on the concept of multigenerational witnessing where “trauma cannot be experienced or resolved by the one who lived it but rather is dealt with by others” (p. 53). Butler and Phillip’s Black speculative feminist fiction is a space where the questioning and exploration of layered accounts of trauma can take place. Kindred and Telescope Effect: Part I use the theme of time travel to “perform this witnessing, connecting ancestors who exist outside of living memory” (p. 54). Additionally, Jones makes beautiful connections to the published and unpublished works of Butler and Phillips as Black speculative feminists to bring attention to their lives devotion to numerous concepts that deconstruct temporality toward a liberated Black future.
In Chapter Four, Jones depicts how Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series offers a space to imagine futures beyond colonial ties. Butler’s Black speculative fiction takes readers backwards through time and invites us to learn the lesson—without remembering history, people are destined to recreate the future of the oppressed past. Jones draws on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, to assess “the role of memory in moments of liberation and the importance of their intervention in the development of new cultural structures and deployment of power in Butler’s novels” (p. 71-72). Lieux de mémoire primarily represents rigid, Western privileged accounts of memory such as museums, memorials, and eulogies. However, Butler’s extension of lieux de mémoire in the Patternist series includes legends, folklores, and other narratives that are fluid and offer new possibilities. While Jones gives an excellent foundation to the other character’s in the Patternist series, she pinpoints the immortal, shape-shifting African woman, Anyanwu. Anyanwu’s character functions as a lieux de mémoire that defies the historical act of forgetting “and acting as a voice of resistance whose memory offers revolutionary potential” (p. 72).
In Black Speculative Feminisms: Memory and Liberated Futures in Black Women’s Fiction, Jones writes the complexities and interventions of Black feminist speculative fiction’s restorative fabulation with a great ethic of care, tact, and empowering analysis. Readers, professors, and literary critics will appreciate and value Jones’s pinpointing the literary transformation and interventions in Black speculative feminist texts similar to Toni Morrison’s call in Whiteness and the Literary Imagination: Playing in the Dark. Black Speculative Feminisms itself serves as a form of restorative fabulation, where readers can be inspired and encouraged by the alternative representations and assessments of intergenerational trauma, forgetting, and healing.
Tiffani J. Smith, Ph.D. is a first-generation, Black girlhood, Communication/Media Studies and Hip Hop scholar in the field of Education, holding a doctoral certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Claremont Graduate University (CGU). Her dissertation, “’Real Queens Fix Each Other’s Crown’: Addressing the MissEducation of the Blackgirl”, highlights the impact of Blackgirl collectives on educational persistence, community cultural wealth, and literacies. She has presented, chaired, and served as a discussant at numerous conferences including: American Educational Research Association (AERA), National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), and National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS). In 2022, she was awarded the Emerging Scholars Award at the New Directions in the Humanities Conference and the Black Scholars Award from CGU in 2023. Currently, Tiffani is a lecturer at California State University, Fullerton’s in the University’s Honors Program.