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The Racism and Racist Images of Blacks in Early Speculative Fiction

Africans, and those of African descent, have not been treated well by speculative fiction, both inside its texts and in real life. Anti-African racism is a fact of life in Western culture, and was even more pronounced before 1945. Not surprisingly, the number of works of speculative fiction written by black writers is low. But that number is not zero, and it’s worth taking a look at the fantasy and science fiction stories that black writers produced before 1945.

Basics

I’m using “speculative fiction” in a broad sense here, to include science fiction, fantasy, and horror of all degrees. I’m similarly using “black” in a broad sense, to any of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. And I’m using “history” in the broadest sense possible. A fully accurate history of black speculative fiction would be book length and would be impossible to write. As Harlan Ellison once noted to Samuel Delaney, nothing is known of dozens of the writers of the pulps of the first half of the 20th century. Many of them might have been women or people of color. The same is true of many dime novel authors in the 19th century — all that we know of them are their names. They, too, could have been black. So exhaustiveness is not possible. What is possible is a shorter essay which concedes at the outset to being flawed and incomplete.

Too, the word “history” implies some sort of connection or continuum between the subjects addressed. There is none such with the texts and authors listed here. It can be argued that there the concept of science fiction as a discrete literary genre existed through the second half of the 19th century, but the authors listed below seem to have had no effect on each other. The 1827 proto-police procedural novel Richmond: Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner could have established the genre of detective fiction, but it appeared in isolation and disappeared without influencing other authors. So, too, with these early works of black speculative fiction.

The 19th Century

There was speculative fiction in the 1850s, ranging from the future history of Jane Ellis’ A Vision of Our Country in the Year Nineteen Hundred (1851) to Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1859) and its microscopic world. But no speculative fiction was as radical as Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America, partially published as a serial in the Anglo-American Magazine in 1859 and then republished as a whole in the Weekly Anglo-American in 1861 and 1862. In 1859 Delany was, along with Frederick Douglass…

Read more: io9

 

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