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  • Brandon Miller Doctoral Defense

Brandon Miller Doctoral Defense

    College of Liberal Arts
    image of Brandon smiling wwaring a grey sweater

    Brandon Miller Doctoral Defense - Friday, 3/22 at 10 AM via Zoom

    Committee: James Salazar (Chair), Katherine Henry (Emerita), Roland Williams, Patricia Melzer (Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies)

    Title: "A Century New for the Duty and the Deed": Black Speculative Fiction at the Turn of the 20th Century

    Abstract:

    My dissertation examines four Black speculative novels from the turn of the twentieth century, published between 1892-1904. Texts from this tradition tend to be grouped under an umbrella of “proto-Afrofuturism” or “proto-science fiction” and considered as early, surprising instances of a speculative mode that would only fully emerge several decades later. This categorization, while accurate in some respects, flattens out the diversity of the Black speculative imagination at the turn of the century.

    Therefore, I prioritize demonstrating the uniqueness of each author’s vision. At the same time, I argue that these texts share a fundamental similarity in their approach: they anticipate Arthur Schomburg’s famous injunction that the “Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” They use the affordances of the speculative mode to experiment with a shared Black history and explore the possibilities and limitations of that history for a viable and desirable Black future.

    The authors that I examine challenge the conclusions of racial science that were used to justify a racially stratified society. In doing so, these authors speculate about the imminent future of Black Americans. But even though the perspective of these texts is the imminent future, their central preoccupation is actually Black history. Each of these texts experiment with a different possible shared history with which Black Americans can anchor a collective political identity.

    Contact tara.lemma.diffley@temple.edu for the Zoom link!

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    Additional Info

    Created By: College of Liberal Arts, English
    Sponsors: Department of English
    Open To: Public
    Intended Audience: Open to all
    Type: Student Presentation
    Tags: Doctoral Dissertation // Dissertation // Writing // Afrofuturism

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