"Tectonically Speaking": Writing A Black Geopolitics Through Speculative Fiction: A Reading List by Nathan Alexander Moore
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A reading list by Nathan Alexander Moore from her teach-in “Tectonically Speaking: Writing A Black Geopolitics Through Speculative Fiction” for The School For Black Feminist Politics.
On Tuesday, April 6th, 2021,, scholar Nathan Alexander Moore led a teach-in on “Tectonically Speaking: Writing A Black Geopolitics Through Speculative Fiction”.
About the teach-in: We are supposedly in the middle of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene and its attendant discourses are deeply temporal; often speaking doubly to both a history of human-produced climate crisis on one end and bleak futurity on the other. The imaginaries of the Anthropocene are often wrought with images of catastrophe. However, the question must be asked: What does this naming of catastrophe truly mean for Black diasporic subjects who have always already been enduring social and environmental disaster? How do the way that we temporalize and name systems of human interaction with the environment take into account Black diasporic subjects? The moniker of the Anthropocene as both political rallying cry and geosocial temporal schema gives me pause. When we think of the Anthropos (Man), we must also consider who is summarily and constitutively left out of this framework.
Moreover, the totalizing narrative of the ‘human factors’ that drive climate change often do not attend to or historicize the longue durée of the effects of trans-Atlantic slavery, imperialism, and racial capitalism. As a way to get at these variously interwoven threads, I turn to the speculative work of novelist NK Jemisin to investigate how Black diasporic artist are reimagining climate crisis and the way forward through and beyond the limits of Anthropocene discourses. NK Jemisin is an award-winning African American writer, who often works through the genre of fantasy. Jemisin crafts worlds different from our own, but whose imagined realities reflect the deep sociohistorical fissures of our own. With The Broken Earth Trilogy, Jemisin maps new speculations on the human, temporality, and spatiality.
About the teach-in curator: Nathan Alexander Moore (she/they) is a Black genderfluid transfemme writer, scholar, and dreamer. She is interested in critical and creative methods to explore the nuances of Blackness, queerness, and temporality – usually through the lens of Black speculative arts and genre fiction. They hold a master’s degree from SUNY Buffalo where they studied creative writing and Black literature and cultures. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin in the department of African and African Diaspora Studies. Their work has previously been published or is forthcoming from Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando from Damaged Goods Press, P-QUEUE, ode to Queer and Peauxdunque Review.
“Tectonically Speaking: Writing A Black Geopolitics Through Speculative Fiction”: A Reading List
Clark, Nigel. “Politics of Strata.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 34, no. 2–3, SAGE Publications Ltd, May 2017, pp. 211–31.
Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 16, no. 4, 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 761–80.
Jemisin, N. K. The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015.
---. The Obelisk Gate. Orbit, 2016.
---. The Stone Sky. Orbit, 2017.
Karera, Axelle. “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics.” Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 7, no. 1, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, pp. 32–56.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press Books, 2019.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.