Book analyzes black female imagination

Published by the University of Georgia Press, 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, an associate professor of English at Marshall University, 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 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.