In Speculative Time: Race and The Literature of Uncertain Futures Main Menu Introduction Zombifying the "Canon" From Margin to Contagion Opacity World Building Course Information About

Alternative Histories

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In our discussion of opacity, we came across the speculative work of reimagining the past, particularly through formal engagement with its literary texts. Speculative literature has long utilized the past as a site of re-narration and reinvention. Whereas the past is often considered a static object that belongs in the recesses of history, a racialized understanding of the past observes the continuum of past traumas moving and still prevalent in the present. To articulate these present forms, speculative literature forges a way to move back and forth between the two.


 
We see this movement between past and present in the form of time travel in Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Dana, the book’s black woman protagonist finds herself sucked into the antebellum past with a white slave-owning ancestor. While she is able to return to the present, sudden bouts of vertigo will send her back to the past where time is slowed and ages her, prompting her to figure out how to survive in the past with her present-day knowledge. In Kindred, time travel is a speculative narrative device that exposes the prescient nature of slavery and anti-black racism in the present. In this way, speculative literature can point to the residues of the past in the present.
 

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