Imagine Another World: A Philosophical Approach to Black Speculative Arts and Literature

Abstract

Imagine Another World responds to the surge in horror and science fiction in contemporary Black cultural and theoretical projects. This work reads into the expressed conditions of Blackness that yearns for and that builds other material or immaterial realities. Worldbuilding is a way for collective Black imaginations to experience another world that is at the very least different from the anti-Black world order. Throughout each of the four chapters, this interdisciplinary work engages speculative literature, visual arts, and films of the 21st century, including Tananarive Due’s “The Rider” (2023), Wangechi Mutu’s All the Way Up, All the Way Out (2012), and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). Some of the questions that run throughout the chapters are: Why would Black cultural producers need to explore and build other worlds? How are these other worlds built? What do they look like? How can they be accessed or known, or how do they deliberately prevent access? These questions provide a philosophical exploration of the otherworldly representations in contemporary Black arts.