Barbarian + Wizard = Heretic: Evoking the Revolutionary Fantastic in Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon

Abstract

This project reads through Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series as a means of conceptualizing a distinctly revolutionary fantastic. To begin, I establish the fantastic as a specific literary function and outline how it has been studied in relation to the genre of Fantasy. Further, I distinguish the revolutionary fantastic from the category of Radical Fantasy based on the former’s resistance to categorizations that impose a definitive fictionality. Relying on the work of thinkers like José Muñoz and Gloria Anzaldúa, I propose the revolutionary fantastic as an affective, queer, and decolonial practice of making belief related to contemporary esoterism but more attuned to the political poetics of queer of color critique. Through Delany, I evoke the figure of the Barbarian as a queerly racialized anachronism emblematic of the revolutionary fantastic’s deconstructive processes. With a specific focus on the Barbarian’s enmeshment in a pastness distinct from the discipline of history, I position this figure as a model for temporal fugitivity that offers a broader revolutionary imaginary by way of fisting theory. In this reading of Delany, I also assemble the crypt as a marginal zone from which the border between reality and unreality may be trespassed, speaking to the revolutionary potential of such trespassing and meditating on the tragic affect of its inevitable failure as a way of showcasing the reconstructive elements of the project’s titular formula. The project closes with a reading of C. L. Clark’s novel The Unbroken, where I demonstrate the applicability of the revolutionary fantastic as an approach to re-reading and re-writing our world(s).