The dark delight of being strange : Black stories of freedom /
Unlike science fiction, which assumes a baseline of ordinary experience and sense of the nature of reality that are marked white, Black speculative literature's baseline is a parallel tradition responding to Black origins in slavery, racism and colonialism. It imagines a future that critiques a...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2025].
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| Series: | Black lives in the diaspora.
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| Summary: | Unlike science fiction, which assumes a baseline of ordinary experience and sense of the nature of reality that are marked white, Black speculative literature's baseline is a parallel tradition responding to Black origins in slavery, racism and colonialism. It imagines a future that critiques and is not bound up with science fiction's white origins in the onset of modernity. Its cosmologies and anthropologies are completely different. The Dark Delight of Being Strange is a work of but not about Black speculative fiction. It explores the inherent meaning of speculative production for thinking, writing, living and enacting concepts of Black freedom and why it is so critical for understanding Black sociality and politics. It combines memoir, storytelling and philosophical prose with the Black imaginary to capture the idea that Black life is surreal, extraordinary, but not (or not only) in the sense of speculative fiction. It leaves us squarely in our world and time to reveal these aspects within the mundane or everyday. James Haile challenges us to rethink contemporary and historical Black life and approaches to freedom outside of Euromodernity in order to demonstrate the avantgarde aesthetic expressions critical to Black political thinking. It offers a rereading of enslavement through an innovative account of Henry Box Brown's famed escape, posits a parallel Black lifeworld as the destination of H. G. Wells' Journey to the Center of the Earth, thematizes time in Henry Dumas as an embodied phenomenological reality, imagines the survival skills of the octopus as an emblem for how to negotiate Black existence, theorizes memory as subject to metaphysical and ontological lack as a result of social alienation, questions whether there can be an outside, a place where Black people can be free, given the condition of death we call democracy as related in James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, and concludes by depicting Frederick Douglass as exemplar of the aesthetic, political and philosophical Blackness that can be free. Each narrative is accompanied by a critical introduction and endnotes that provide philosophical context. Together they argue that Blackness is a fundamental entanglement and not a limit, of the human or of freedom, rather somewhere beyond. Dark Delight invites us to reimagine time, space, place, history and memory and how to understand the past. |
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| Physical Description: | xxv, 230 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231216296 0231216297 9780231216302 0231216300 |