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Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination
Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monae. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities.The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term "posthuman blackness" to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities.This project draws on posthuman theory--an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality--in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Morrison's Beloved . Reading neo-slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.
148 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 4, 2022
I was excited by this book's title, only to be let down. Unfortunately, this is not a strong academic text. Its main problem is that it is theoretically vague and underdeveloped. In particular, the discussions of posthumanism lack rigor. As posthumanism is the central tenet of the book's thesis, this makes for frustrating reading. Posthumanism is unconvincingly and with little support presented as being that which is liminal, atemporal, relational, and subjective. Given the ambiguity with which posthumanism is (un)defined, the book itself is unconvincing. Each chapter reads like the author is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, often relying on questionable interpretations of the works of other theorists - in particular Weheliye and Glissant - to do so. Sadly, I would not recommend this text.
October 22, 2017
Excellent new readings on texts that have bodies of scholarship as well as insightful forays into less examined territories.
June 24, 2017
While this exploration of black female imagination is interesting, I cannot bring the critical deconstruction skills inherently developed in lived experience of black womanhood to my reading, in the same way the author has that gap in writing, which is why I prefer to amplify own voices.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews