Imagining Resistance: Writing Black Liberation Through Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Thesis Proposal, Gallatin School, NYU

The Concept Statement

Have you ever read an evident work of fiction and found yourself struck by the power of its truth? That is arguably the underlying goal of every science-fiction novel: to hold up a mirror that transports one into a world woven with so much detail and imagined reality and fake facts that it leaves the reader utterly enchanted and sated and maybe even a little sad to finish the journey. To realize that the world in which they fell in love only really exists inside their own head. And yet, what lingers is not the “unrealness” of that world, but the disconcerting sense that it has revealed something more honest than the one we return to. This feeling encourages a paradox of invention as revelation. What does it say about our lives when the worlds we escape into, teach us better than the one that birthed us? I believe it is this sense that has allowed science fiction and fantasy, particularly since the turn of the century, to cultivate such a fervent following. In an era defined by rapid technological change and new wave imperialism, the resulting global uncertainty has fractured our shared narratives. Speculative fiction offers a path towards reorientation and reinvention. It gives language to the unspeakable and shapes the abstract. It has the singular power to magnify the futures we fear or desire. Entire communities gather around these imagined worlds because they are immersive, yes, but also because they are necessary.

My own initiation into this devotion was rooted in a feeling of escapism that, as a young girl who learned to hide her Odd Thomas books from her strict Nigerian father and sneakily read Harry Potter under the covers with a flashlight, shaped my outlook on the world. Reading sci-fi and fantasy offered me magic, freedom, invention –– all through the imaginative power of story. However, these texts saved me in one way and stunted me in another. They instructed me in how to believe in a world, how to listen for its internal rhythms, how to take seriously the emotional weight of places that did not exist. And yet, none of these tales were made for me, or for young people like me. The heroines—either slim with ‘olive skin’ or slender with wefts of golden tresses—did not represent me with my wide face and wide hips, my dark hair and even darker skin. What does it mean to be invited so fully into a fantastic new world and yet never quite see yourself within it? What does it mean to inherit the tools of imagination from traditions and tropes that have not imagined you back? This absence, I came to understand, is itself a motivator. It did not diminish my devotion to speculative fiction; instead, it worked to sharpen my love of this genre into something more representative and personal.

My thesis, grounded in this dual pursuit, will consist of one creative manuscript––specifically, a collection of sci-fi stories that explores different generational challenges and survival by playing with the nuances of serial storytelling and worldbuilding. Rooted in my lived experience as a Nigerian American, my work draws from African and African American cosmologies, oral traditions, and reinvented histories to explore storytelling as a site of memory, resistance, and possibility. Through this project, I aim to reframe the “in-between” space of diaspora as a source of imaginative power, moving away from the narratives of fracture and loss. My key artistic and academic questions seek to uncover how, why, and for how long speculative fiction can operate as an act of cultural preservation, identity making, and political defiance.

Description of the Artistic Work and Artistic Aims

As a kid, my eyes devoured the stories of enchanted fey, dragon riders, potion makers, mad scientists, and mystical warriors-––all of whom were the heroes and arbiters of their own futures. I grew up tracing the maps of Alagaësia with the same reverence one might reserve for a homeland, losing hours (days) inside Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series, where dragonfire and ancient languages pulsed with a naturalness I resonated with. I also found myself wandering the vast, meticulously constructed terrains of Middle-earth, where Tolkien’s histories unfolded with a gravity much too heavy for an eleven-year-old to comprehend. But even as I loved these worlds (perhaps because I loved them) I became increasingly aware of their silences. The landscapes were rich, the mythologies expansive, yet the bodies that moved through these fables were imagined within a narrow and exclusionary lens. I searched (unconsciously at first) for reflections of myself—of my history, my culture, my ways of knowing—and found them absent and wanting. To be excluded from the architecture of imagination is a political act. And so, too, is the decision to imagine yourself there, anyway. To insist on your own presence within the genre that once could not conceive of you. It was out of this very tension—between the worlds that had formed me and the ones that had failed to see me—that my own creative and critical impulse was born.

My Gallatin concentration, Imagining Resistance: Writing Black Liberation in Fantasy and Sci-Fi, examines speculative fiction as an artistic practice and a critical tool for preserving, interrogating, and reimagining Black diasporic identity. The inspiration was born early, in the quiet realization that the stories I loved did not love me back. And then molded later, in the even more startling recognition that this was beginning to change. As I have grown older, the world has continued to open itself up in ways my younger self could not have imagined. Stories began to appear (slowly at first, then all at once) that held people who looked like me, sounded like me, carried histories that felt familiar even when they were set galaxies away. I found the works of Octavia Butler and my perspectives exploded. Then came N.K. Jemisin, Tomi Adeyemi, Nnedi Okorafor, Marlon James; writers who not only included Blackness in speculative worlds but built entire cosmologies and social movements from it. Their work wasn’t invention. It was origin. And yet, I couldn’t ignore the fact that these authors were not made accessible to me when I was younger and needed it most.

As a millennial kid, being Black in America was confusing, to say the least. Our culture was splattered across MTV and VH1, but our fathers and brothers were being profiled and gunned down in the streets. I was born in the south in Atlanta, Georgia, whose history and struggle for human rights and equality left me feeling like I had limited options for my future. I know so many young kids who felt the same. Black kids taught that their futures only held work, jail, or death. Imagine, instead, if we had stories that taught us about our own inner strengths, our own intelligence and capacity for greatness. If you look at the popular YA fiction novels of the more recent years, like the 2020’s, it’s much easier to find stories rooted and inspired by Black histories. So why now? Is there a cultural or societal shift that can be attributed to this (long overdue) emergence? This is the engine of my work. With this thesis, I am mapping the conditions that made the visibility of Black speculative writers possible. I aim to explore the secret architecture beneath their successes, the recurring themes of race and class, and compare the negotiation of their politics to understand the collective cultural urgency at work across their texts. I proceed from the belief that there is, if not a formula, then a pattern — and that naming it is both a scholarly and creative act.

The creative anchor of this project is “Black Seeds,” a science-fiction/fantasy short story that doubles as both proof of concept and declaration of intent. Set aboard the Somni X-5––one of a hundred skyships launched during humanity’s Flight from a dying Earth––the story follows Femi and Elias, two scientists carrying frozen embryos and the whole of human memory into the unknown of space. Abandoned by the life-saving AI companion that once guided them, they are left with only each other. What begins as a story of survival grows into a transgenerational battle between love, loss, and what it means to carry a culture forward when the world that made you no longer exists. As with its prequel and sequel, this story is meant to enact what my thesis aims to theorize: what it looks like to build a world from traditions, longing, the specific grief of displacement — and to place that cosmology at the center of a universe.

My artistic aim exists in two parts. Mainly, I want to write something lasting, something necessary. I strive to situate myself within this expanding creative ecosystem and to study these writers, old and new, so that I can understand the mechanics of their world-building, their philosophical theories on time, memory, and power. So that I, too, might one day contribute something that endures and illuminates. Secondly, I want to explore the significance of this moment itself. The increase in Black science fiction and fantasy writers in this time of Black Lives Matter and No Kings marches is political and deeply intentional. These works do something. They shift the boundaries of who gets to imagine the future. They give Black readers—young readers, especially—the ability to see themselves not just surviving worlds but shaping them.

My writing asks what it means to treat names, ancestry, gods, and memory as narrative technologies that shape the future. How might Black speculative storytelling move beyond narratives of survival to imagine worlds rooted in self-determination, interiority, and liberation? Together, this concentration and artistic thesis project reflect my commitment to using storytelling not only to critique existing systems, but to invent new worlds where underrepresented stories can just be, rather than be the exception.

Research Essay

The manuscript will be paired with an analytical component that interrogates the emergence of Black speculative fiction as both a movement and a method. The research is guided by a series of interrelated questions: What are the common thematic threads across contemporary Black speculative works? What histories do they draw from, and what futures do they attempt to construct? What distinguishes this current wave of Black sci-fi and fantasy from earlier iterations? And perhaps most importantly, what power do these stories hold — not just to reflect society, but to actively shape its trajectory? Writers like N.K. Jemisin, whose Fifth Season trilogy reaches into the geological violence of colonialism to imagine what survival looks like across generations; Nnedi Okofor, whose Binti series draws on African tradition and the rituals of identity to navigate alien worlds; and P. Djèlí Clark, whose alternate Cairo pulses with Islamic mysticism and the afterlives of empire. These are only a few of the authors who seem to be at the forefront of this new wave, each one insisting that Black history, religion, and culture are not just context for these stories, but the architecture of them. Because if these works are resonating so widely now, it is not by accident. I think we should all pay closer attention.

Now, I read differently with the intention and desire not just to consume stories, but to understand the conditions that produced them. I have been drawn to collections and critical texts such as Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction (edited by Sheree Renée Thomas), which gathers voices from across the African diaspora to insist that science fiction has always been a dominant part of the diasporic. This will help me to understand whether the current wave is a fad or if this emergence can be seen as something bigger. Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction (edited by Isaiah Lavender III), is another source that provides a critical vocabulary for reading race as a structural force in the genre rather than merely a thematic one. This will inform how I approach questions of pattern and architecture in these books.  Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (edited by Eugene Bacon), which maps the ideological and aesthetic range of Afrofuturist expression, helps me trace the recurring cultural themes that so many of these works share. Each text, in its own way, attempts to map the contours of a field that feels at once newly visible and historically rooted. To challenge my own assumptions, I also engaged with Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, which forced me to consider how deeply race is embedded not just in the stories we tell, but in the structures that determine which stories are legitimized. I believe this to be a necessary perspective, reminding me that the success of Black speculative fiction cannot be understood in isolation from the forces that have historically worked against it.

Across all these texts, one term surfaced repeatedly: Afrofuturism or Speculative Blackness. And yet, each encounter with it seemed to offer a slightly different definition. Some describe it as a decentering of the imperial gaze and a recentering of Afro-descended peoples [Bacon]. Others position it as a critical framework, a methodology, or even a disruption of the binary between science and cosmology [Thomas]. For me, it is older than any of these things. Afrofuturism existed long before Mark Dery coined the term in 1994. It lived in spirituals that encoded escape as prophecy. In the mythmaking of survival. In Sun Ra’s insistence that Black existence was already cosmic. In Octavia Butler’s reimagining of power and humanity itself. It emerged wherever Black people were forced to imagine beyond the constraints of their reality to endure it. To study Afrofuturism or “Blackness” in speculative fiction, then, is move beyond the genre and to trace into its lineage. To ask how imagination functions under conditions of displacement and oppression.

To move through this material, I am working at the intersection of two related methodological approaches: research-creation and practice-based research. Research-creation merges the scholarly inquiry with creative production by allowing the act of making to stand as legitimate proof of knowing. Practice-based research extends this further, positioning the creative work itself as a form of evidence. Together, these frameworks allow me to test the patterns I am identifying not just through analysis (truth), but through fiction. My own writing becomes a kind of laboratory space where I can test whether the patterns I am tracing in other writers' work are generative, whether they can be consciously engaged, and what new trends or tropes emerge if they are. The critical and the creative will be in constant conversation, each shaping and pressure-testing the other.

Justifications and Limitations

Pick up a pen and you will soon find that writing science fiction presents a particular set of challenges. Unlike realist fiction, speculative work demands a level of worldbuilding and attention to detail that requires either rigorous fact-checking or rigorous (and rational) invention —oftentimes simultaneously. Every deviation from the real world must be constructed with enough internal logic to remain believable and even more cleverness to sustain the illusion.  And when the work is rooted in Black speculative traditions specifically, that construction carries additional weight. The futures and histories being told are inherently, whether we like it or not, political arguments. And arguments must be made carefully.

There is also the risk of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called the danger of a single story, or the flattening of a complex, plural experience into one representative narrative. In writing Black speculative fiction, and in studying it, I am aware that no single text, including my own, can carry the full weight of a tradition. The temptation to generalize, to locate a pattern and mistake it for a rule, is one I remain vigilant against. This limitation comes with a fear that in reaching for something universal, I inadvertently narrow what I set out to expand.

If speculative fiction has the power to imagine futures, then it also has the power to decide who belongs in them, and who gets cut out. Blackness, for all its visibility, remains persistently misunderstood. It is often reduced to an aesthetic and becomes stripped of the intellectual and political frameworks that give it weight. But Blackness is visual; it’s epistemological and riddled with knowledge: who produces it, who is excluded from it, and how it might be reimagined. Questions of ownership further complicate the thesis. Who has the authority to define Afrofuturism? Is it a diasporic framework, a continental one, or something more fluid? Nnedi Okorafor's distinction between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism gestures toward these tensions, highlighting both the richness and the friction within the discourse. What emerges is not a singular, stable definition, but a constantly evolving conversation. At the same time, increased visibility brings its own challenges. As Afrofuturism in fiction enters mainstream consciousness, it becomes susceptible to commodification. Its aesthetics can be absorbed into popular culture while its radical potential is diluted or ignored. What was once a mode of resistance risks becoming a marketable trend. (Maybe that’s what’s happening, now.) There is also the question of expectation. Once labeled "Afrofuturist," Black speculative work may be pressured to conform to “easily recognizable” patterns like overt cosmic and religious themes, or predictable racial struggles. This can generalize less easily categorized narratives that still operate within speculative styles. Finally, there is the weight of history. To imagine Black futures is to contend with the persistence of Black pasts and current realities marked by structural violence, trauma, and injustice. Utopian visions can feel tenuous, even indulgent, in the face of ongoing inequity. Yet dystopian narratives, if not carefully handled, risk stunting the lives they seek to liberate.

Annotated Bibliography

Bacon, Eugen, editor. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

This critical collection examines speculative fiction through an Afro-centered framework, focusing on how Black writers construct futures grounded in African and diasporic cultural perspectives. The text explores themes such as technology intertwined with spirituality, the role of ancestry in futurist narratives, and the rejection of dominant Western science fiction paradigms. For this project, this source is valuable because it provides a theoretical lens for analyzing Black speculative storytelling, particularly in how it redefines futurism to include cultural memory and identity. It supports the idea that Afro-centered speculative fiction is not only imaginative but also politically and culturally significant, offering alternative visions of the future that challenge systemic erasure and center Black voices and experiences.

Barr, Marleen S., editor. Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory. Ohio State University Press, 2008.

This combined critical anthology and short story collection is the first of its kind to center Black women in speculative fiction through written and visual texts. Barr and her contributors develop a woman-centered framework for Afrofuturism, arguing for a broader, more inclusive definition of science fiction that accounts for varieties of Black women's writing historically excluded from the genre. For this project, Afro-Future Females is particularly useful for its attention to gender as an interrogation on exclusion and radical reimagining within sci-fi traditions. I am also using this text for its insistence that Afrofuturism should not be studied without centering the voices and visions of Black women writers.

Butler, Philip, editor. Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

This collection goes beyond conventional analysis to imagine Black futures across multiple domains like art, theology, technology, practice, and cosmology. Drawing on contributors from a range of fields, Butler’s work treats speculation as a methodological practice that was inspired from W. E. B. Du Bois's own speculative writings on the theories of trans-Blackness and artificial intelligence.

Carrington, André M. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Carrington analyzes the relationship between genre conventions in speculative fiction and the meanings ascribed to Blackness in the popular imagination. He argues that the genre itself is deeply racialized, in its representations and in the structures of authorship, fandom, and cultural legitimacy that determine which stories count as science fiction at all. Drawing on case studies that include Star Trek, Marvel Comics, Milestone Media, and online fan fiction, Carrington shows how Black writers, artists, and fans have consistently pushed back against and reworked these structures. For this project, Speculative Blackness is essential for its theoretical account of how Blackness functions within modern genres, and for its attention to the relationship between authorship and cultural power.

Cornum, Lou. "Skin Worlds: Black and Indigenous Science Fiction Theorizing Since the 1970s." Dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center, 2021.

Cornum's dissertation traces a shared tradition of speculative worldbuilding across Black and Indigenous science fiction. It highlights readings on authors like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel Delany, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Their exploration uncovers thematic stories about the structures of settler colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery. Cornum argues that these texts actively construct alternative space-times and modes of relation. For this project, Skin Worlds is useful for its attention to worldbuilding as both a literary and political practice, and for the way it situates Black speculative fiction within a broader decolonial conversation that supersedes any single genre.

Freedman, Carl Howard. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. 1st ed., University Press of New England, 2000.

In this book, Carl Freedman argues that science fiction is not just entertainment but a way of critically examining society. He explains how science fiction creates distance from the present in order to expose social, political, and ideological structures. Although Freedman does not focus on race, his ideas help frame speculative fiction as a form of knowledge production. This source supports the analytical portion of the thesis by providing a theoretical foundation for understanding speculative writing as a method of questioning power and imagining alternatives—frameworks that this project applies to Black speculative and fantasy writing.

John G. Russell; “Darkies Never Dream: Race, Racism, and the Black Imagination in Science Fiction.” CR: The New Centennial Review 1 November 2018; 18 (3): 255–278. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.18.3.0255

In this article, Russell challenges the racist idea that Black people lack imaginative or futuristic vision. He argues that Black speculative fiction directly resists narratives that limit Black life to realism, trauma, or survival. This source is especially useful for framing speculative writing as political defiance and self-assertion. For this thesis, Russell supports the claim that imagining Black futures is itself a powerful cultural and political act, and that speculative fiction serves as a space where Black writers can reclaim their identity.

Lau, Kimberly J. Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale / Kimberly J. Lau. Wayne State University Press, 2025.

Lau’s book explores how European fairy tales developed alongside ideas about race and empire, revealing that fantasy has never been racially neutral. Although the focus is on European traditions, this source is valuable because it shows how fantasy genres have historically excluded or distorted racial difference. This project uses Lau’s analysis to highlight how Black fantasy and speculative writing push back against these traditions by reclaiming the genre as a space for expressing radical imagination.

Lavender, Isiah. Race in American Science Fiction. 1st ed., Indiana University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17kw9cz.

Lavender examines how race operates within American science fiction, both in how characters are portrayed and how worlds are constructed. He argues that science fiction often reflects racial hierarchies but can also challenge them. This book is useful for understanding how speculative fiction can function as political critique by reshaping ideas about race, humanity, and the future.

Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press, 2019.

Thomas introduces the concept of the "dark fantastic cycle"– a recurring narrative pattern in which Black characters in mainstream fantasy are spectacularized, subjected to violence, and ultimately dismissed — to argue that the diversity crisis in science fiction is a problem of representation and imagination. Through case studies drawn from The Hunger Games, Merlin, The Vampire Diaries, and Harry Potter, she demonstrates how Black characters are structurally positioned as “Dark Others” whose function is to shore up white protagonists rather than exist as full subjects. For this project, The Dark Fantastic provides a crucial counter-framework: by naming the conditions under which Black characters are diminished in mainstream speculative fiction, it sharpens the argument for why Black speculative writing — authored and controlled by Black writers — is significant.

Thomas, Sheree R. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Grand Central Publishing, 2014.

Dark Matter collects speculative fiction by Black writers across the African diaspora, showing that Black science fiction and fantasy have a long, rich history. The anthology preserves these stories as part of a continuous cultural tradition. For this project, Dark Matter is important because it demonstrates how speculative writing functions as the preservation of society and memory, that are often excluded from mainstream literary spaces. The collection also shows how Black writers use speculative genres to subvert racism, supporting the idea that speculative fiction can be a form of political defiance.

Thomas, Sheree Renée, editor. Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction. Tordotcom, 2022.

Africa Risen is another contemporary anthology of speculative fiction by African and African diaspora writers, highlighting emerging and established voices shaping modern Black science fiction and fantasy. The collection emphasizes imaginative storytelling rooted in diverse cultural perspectives, blending futurism, mythology, and social commentary. For this project, Africa Risen is valuable because it expands on the legacy established in earlier anthologies like Dark Matter, showing how Black speculative fiction continues to evolve while remaining grounded in cultural memory and identity. The stories illustrate how Black authors use fantasy and science fiction not only to reimagine the future but also to reclaim narrative power, challenge dominant Western tropes, and center African cosmologies and experiences. This supports the idea that speculative fiction serves as both creative expression and a means of cultural preservation and resistance within Black storytelling traditions.