Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory, edited by Marleen S. Barr, is the first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. The contributors, including Hortense Spillers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor. They articulate a platform for scholars to mount a vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a range of black women’s writing that would otherwise be excluded. Afro-Future Females builds upon Barr’s previous work in black science fiction and fills a gap in the literature. It is the first critical anthology to address the "blackness" of outer space fiction in terms of feminism, emphasizing that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. Black science fiction writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself. The work’s main point: black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the nascent twenty-first century.
Sheree Renée Thomas is a native of Memphis. A Cave Canem Fellow and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, her short stories, poetry, and articles have appeared in various publications, including storySouth, Callaloo, Colorlines, Essence Magazine, Upscale, VIBE, Obsidian III, Harpur Palate, The Washington Post Book World, Meridians, African Voices, Drumvoices Revue, Black Renaissance /Renaissance Noire as well as in several anthologies, including Mojo: Conjure Stories, Hurricane Blues, Role Call, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, The Ringing Ear, MYTHIC 2, Southern Revival, Bronx Biannual, and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy. A mother of two daughters and a teaching artist, Sheree is the editor of two anthologies (Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, winner of the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Award) and of SCARAB, a limited, signed artist edition of the Coptic-bound anthology. SHOTGUN LULLABIES: Stories & Poems, is the first collection of her work.
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