INTRODUCTION
1. Haraway joins Morrison, Tal, hooks, and Eshun in positioning black subjects—and, in particular, black women—as representative figures in her theorizing, but critics challenge her choice to group together dissimilar women of color as cyborgs solely on the basis of their shared outsider status. See Schueller, Sandoval, Puar, and Wilkerson for critiques of Haraway’s reliance on women of color in her cyborg theorizing.
2. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Superdome housed storm refugees. Reports of suffering in the Superdome—unsanitary living conditions, sexual violence, and food and water shortages—coupled with accusations of racism against the mainstream media and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) indicate the confluence of race, gender, and class oppressions. The mothers in the video hold photos of their deceased sons, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, black men whose deaths became associated with the Black Lives Matter Movement.
3. Connecticut College presented An Afrofuturism Symposium in November of 2016; the New School hosted Afrofuturism: #Blackisviral in May 2016 and Afrofuturism: Designing New Narratives to Empower the African Diaspora in May 2015; New York University held the symposium Posthuman Futures in April 2016; Clark Atlanta University put on the symposium Ancient and New STE(A)M: Roots and Futures of Black Speculative Arts and Science Fictions in February of 2016; the University of Geneva in Switzerland organized Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman in June 2015; the Humanities Division at Essex County College put on Speculative Humanities: Steampunk to Afrofuturism in March 2015; Pomona and Scripps Colleges hosted Midnight Vistas, an Afrofuturism conference, in February 2015; and Loyola Marymount University organized the colloquium Astro-Blackness: Remaking and (Re) Mixing Black Identity Before, Now and Beyond in February 2014.
CHAPTER 1
Temporal Liminality in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy
1. The reference to “Sixty Million and more” comes from Morrison’s dedication at the beginning of Beloved.
2. See Beaulieu, O’Reilly, and Demetrakopoulos for more on the symbolic value of mother’s milk in Beloved.
3. See Marianne Hirsch’s The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989) for more on the disruption of relational triangles in Beloved.
4. Scholars differ on their assessments of Lina’s position on Vaark’s farm, with some referring to her as a “slave” (Moore 4; Wyatt, “Failed” 129) and others a “servant” or “worker” (Morgenstern 14). For more on the legal status of Native Americans during the colonial period, see Moore.
CHAPTER 2
Posthuman Solidarity in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
1. A Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer shot Grant while he was hand-cufFed and lying face down on the platform at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland, California, on January 1, 2009. A homeowner in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, shot McBride after she knocked on his door following a car crash on November 2, 2013.
2. The catchphrase “Hands up, don’t shoot,” along with the corresponding hands up gesture, developed following claims that Michael Brown had his hands raised and mouthed, “Don’t shoot,” to Darren Wilson moments before the officer shot him.
3. For more on the significance of Mammy as a character, as well as her influence on Rufel’s development, see Rushdy, “Reading” and Rushdy, Neo-Slave.
4. For more information about Dinah, Dessa’s real-life counterpart, see Davis.
CHAPTER 3
Afrofuturist Aesthetics in the Works of Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, and Gayl Jones
1. For more information on Spratt’s cover art, see Zoladz.
2. In More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Eshun’s style of pagination appears to mirror the track numbers and run time of audio recordings, with the negative numbers suggesting an interlude or preface. I cite his page numbers as they appear in his text.
3. See my article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Slavery? The Problems and Promise of Mothering in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’” for more on Spillers’s work and the link between historical and contemporary constructions of black identity.
CHAPTER 4
Posthuman Multiple Consciousness in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction
1. Morrison discusses Middle Passage alienations in an interview with Paul Gilroy, published in Gilroy’s Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. Eshun notes that Tate’s discussion of slavery and signification can be found in an unpublished interview with Tate by Mark Sinker. My references to Tate come from Eshun’s account of the interview in “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.”
CHAPTER 5
Submarine Transversality in Texts by Sheree Renée Thomas and Julie Dash
1. Thomas published part of this story under the title “How Sukie Come Free” in volume 1, issue 1 of Black Magnolias (2001–02): 86–87.
2. Citations for Glissant refer to works from his collection Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays.
3. For more on psychoanalytic readings of the black subject’s psychosexual development, please see Spillers, Lillvis.
4. Citations for Daughters refer to the original page numbers of Dash’s screenplay.
5. Hortense J. Spillers, Patricia Hill Collins, Gloria I. Joseph, and other theorists of the black family critique the white, Western model of the family in which the mother holds primary responsibility for childcare, arguing for, among other solutions, more equal parenting and altered social, political, and economic conditions for mothers. The collection Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (1991), edited by Patricia Bell-Scott et al., provides a sound overview of mothering in the black family, including commentary on the power of black motherhood and constructions of community parenting.