Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In 1993, Mark Deary coined the term “Afrofuturism” to describe a cultural phenomenon, aesthetic genre, and interpretive lens that explores the relationship between Black Atlantic art, and issues of social justice in a global and technology-intensive world. This paper builds on existing critical conversations about the role ahistorical narrative approaches to the past play in redirecting the claims of “History” on Black socio-technical futures. This study sets the table for a reexamination of the legal and philosophical questions that underpin the contemporary bioethical debates embedded in Black speculative textual languages. I uncover these debates—from questions of freedom, power, and surveillance in relation to the carceral state and digital technologies to questions of reproductive inequality—as the source and critical departure of Black speculative narrative structure, language, and metaphor. Revising what Mudhu Dubey calls “the haunting afterlife of past in the present,” this paper explores how these texts advance an interdisciplinary, revisionary hermeneutic. Through their refusal to accommodate the intertextual relationship between the “History” and the racialized present they creatively lay bare, I uncover a grammar for understanding how these texts uniquely cite, map, and redirect the connections between past and present forces of racialization. If the obstacles to critical thinking are covered and disavowed in and through racial terms, Black speculation, I argue, take us “a step forward to go a mile deep” in moral reasoning toward more robust pedagogies at the intersections of textual studies, critical race studies, bioethics, and the future of liberal learning.