Tag: black speculative fiction

Review of The International Black Speculative Writing Festival 2024

Reviewed by Amirah Muhammad

Founded by Dr Kadija George Sesay, the International Black Speculative Writing Symposium and Festival was a three-day in-person event at Goldsmiths, University of London, held in February 2024, alongside a single-day online event for global audiences. The festival offered workshops for writers, readings and performances, speakers’ panels, interviews, and group discussions. The festival’s many partners included Comma Press, Spread The Word, New Writing South, Writing East Midlands, TLC, Writing Our Legacy, Peepal Tree Press and Yaram Arts. The event was supported by Arts Council England, Professor Deidre Osborne and the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. The festival’s authorised bookseller was This is Book Love. The BSFA had a stall featuring its publications, showcasing African writers from the Luna Press and launching Kampala Yénkya – an applied African speculative culture project on imagining climate futures by Dilman Dila and Vector editors.

As the first of its kind, the festival promised all the thrills of a new experience, alongside the anticipation of a skilfully curated event. Across its online and in-person events, titans of Black Speculative Fiction abounded, including Sheree Renée Thomas, Professor Reynaldo Anderson, Dr. Karen Lord, Dr. Courttia Newland, and Leone Ross. I spent three days at Goldsmiths absorbing new fiction in all its forms, building new personal and intellectual connections, and exploring new ways of thinking about Black Speculative Fiction.

Professor Reynaldo Anderson
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An Earnest Blackness

Eugen Bacon contemplates Black speculative fiction, and recommends the works of Suyi Davies Okungbowa and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Decades after the ground-breaking work of speculative authors such as Toni Morrison, Samuel R. Delany, and Octavia Butler, Black speculative fiction is more visible and more thriving than ever. Through invented worlds and technologies, and incursions of the supernatural or the uncanny, more and more Black speculative fiction authors are offering stories of curiosity, diversity and hope, possibilities, probabilities, even dire warnings about our place in the universe. 

There’s power in Black speculative fiction. In a continued response to global events, speculative fiction authors are increasingly curious and experimental, writing across genres in a rise of future forms and modes to tell radical tales that speak to our curiosities, to lost or forgotten cultures, to decolonising language, and to deconstructing and reconstructing self and identity. 

The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, Toni Morrison, saw narrative as radical. She wrote revolutionary stories, including her literary horror novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1987) — with its unsettling scrutiny at the awful legacy of slavery, and a Black woman forced to make a terrible choice — and Song of Solomon (1998), with its genre bending across literary and speculative, and themes of resilience and belief: 

“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”

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“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”

Song of Solomon culminates with protagonist Milkman’s leap, a surrender to the air so he can ride it. And now, more than ever, people of colour are increasingly adopting Black speculative fiction — in stories of possibility — so they too can surrender to the air, and ride it. 

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