Dhalgren: Samuel Delany, afrofuturism, & black SF @samueldelany - Tumblr Blog

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I’m participating in "Afrofuturism and the Law: A Symposium for Justice" on April 24th. I’ll discuss how speculative narratives can help us interrogate our legal systems. Specifically through the lens of stories like "Motherlode" and "Don’t Stop, Can’t Stop" from my collection MOJORHYTHM. These works extrapolate on reproductive justice, the history of legal precedent and how Black women and girls are often the first impacted - adversely - and the systemic challenges within the music industry.

The question I’m asking is what is justice and who gets it and who doesn’t.

Looking forward to exploring these intersectional topics alongside keynote speaker Dr. Reynaldo Anderson and fellow special guests Dr. Walter Greason, Ytasha L. Womack, Danian Darrell Jerry, MFA, Casarae Abdul Ghani, Dr. Aaron X Smith, Stacey Robinson (creator of the visual art for this symposium) and Bennett Capers, and more. --Sheree Renee Thomas

“They put up barriers, the same way with our bodies. Our bodies are meant for us to be very expressive. Hawaiians were like that. . . . To me it was an expression of the mahele of our bodies, the restriction of our bodies, the control of our expression of our bodies.” —Kuʻumeaaloha Gomes

Generated from the life histories of ten Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) elders (kūpuna) who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or māhū (LGBTQM), this book reveals the way they experienced overlapping Native/Indigenous and LGBTQM identities. The Mahele of Our Bodies: Nā Moʻolelo Kūpuna Māhū/LGBTQ is filled with rich descriptions of Hawaiʻi’s unwritten queer history, from growing up in the late Territory era and Hawai‘i’s transition to a state, to vivid descriptions of Honolulu nightlife in the 1960s and 1970s, the impact of HIV/AIDS in the hula community, and first-person accounts of the activism and political debates surrounding same-sex marriage rights in the 1990s.

Each life history explores themes of the significance of Hawaiian culture in identity formation, the ongoing prevalence of colonialism and Christianity, the importance of community activism, the role of culture and performance, and the complexities of leaving home to fully come out. The kūpuna in this book have much to teach us about how they survived. Stephanie Nohelani Teves edited the interviews she conducted into first person moʻolelo or stories. Their vivid descriptions of what life was like for them during the Hawaiian renaissance or at the height of the fight for same-sex marriage serve as a reminder of how much emotional and physical labor was expended so that present-day Kānaka LGBTQM can imagine different possibilities and hopeful futures.

One of the only studies of Native/Indigenous queer oral histories, this book also features a robust Introduction that explores community and nation building, culture and tradition, and how all are navigated within the context of Hawaiian sovereignty and LGBTQM civil rights.

Womb City, by Tlotlo Tsamaase: this genre-bending Africanfuturist horror novel blends The Handmaid’s Tale with Get Out in an adrenaline-packed, cyberpunk body-hopping ghost story exploring motherhood, memory, and a woman’s right to her own body.

Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah’s perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.

The truth claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave.

As the ghost of her victim viciously hunts down the people Nelah holds dear, she is thrust into a race against the clock: in order to save any of her remaining loved ones, Nelah must unravel the political conspiracy her victim was on the verge of exposing—or risk losing everyone.

Set in a cruel futuristic surveillance state where bodies are a government-issued resource, this harrowing story is a twisty, nail-biting commentary on power, monstrosity, and bodily autonomy. In sickeningly evocative prose, Womb City interrogates how patriarchy pits women against each other as unwitting collaborators in their own oppression. In this devastatingly timely debut novel, acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase brings a searing intelligence and Botswana’s cultural sensibility to the question: just how far must a woman go to bring the whole system crashing down?

distantvoices

Dominique Silver and Shanelle Nyasiase photographed by Louie Banks for Renaissance Couture designed by Olivier Rousteing and Beyoncé

"This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories. Here, readers will discover bio-engineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, motherships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492. Contributors include Darcie Little Badger, Mari Kurisato, Kai Minosh Pyle, David Alexander Robertson, and jaye simpson."

Lambda Literary Award winner, 2021.

"Sylvia Rivera made transgender history when this portrait—of her (center), partner Julia Murray (right), and friend Christina Hayworth—taken on the day before New York City’s 2000 Pride March, was added to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2015. It’s the first portrait of a transgender person to be included in this important institution’s holdings."

--Making Gay History: The Podcast

“I feel the science-fictional enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization.”

—Samuel R. Delany, “From the Triton Journal: Work Notes and Omitted Pages,” 1976

Encountering Samuel R. Delany’s work, for me at least, can be described in two phases (more like paroxysms): the first is being so overcome

"Anyway, I was saying before that some of my first writing was erotic writing. I wrote down these masturbation narratives that were combinations of Conan the Conqueror, and maybe a little bit of Tarzan of the Apes which also used the word—Edgar Rice Burroughs was profligate with that—and so I put those words in because I knew that I wasn’t supposed to write them, and by putting them there they became highly erotic. I was using language that was not approved."

A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler offers a blueprint for a creative life from the perspective of award-winning science-fiction writer and "MacArthur Genius" Octavia E. Butler. It is a collection of ideas about how to look, listen, breathe―how to be in the world. This book is about the creative process, but not on the page; its canvas is much larger. Author Lynell George not only engages the world that shaped Octavia E. Butler, she also explores the very specific processes through which Butler shaped herself―her unique process of self-making. It's about creating a life with what little you have―hand-me-down books, repurposed diaries, journals, stealing time to write in the middle of the night, making a small check stretch―bit by bit by bit. Highly visual and packed with photographs of Butler's ephemera, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky draws the reader into Butler's world, creating a sense of unmatched intimacy with the deeply private writer.

The wyrm knew an interested indifference—and it knew rage more total that any creature on earth.

A short fiction piece, published in The Baffler in 2022.

Chapter 90 - the missing chapter from "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders" by Samuel R. Delany, with a photo by Ted Barron, from Sens

bookclub4m

15 Creative Writing books by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill edited by Jericho Brown

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat

About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews by Samuel R. Delany

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri

This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley

Reading and Writing: A Personal Account by V.S. Naipaul

How Dare We! Write edited by Sherry Quan Lee

The African American Guide to Writing & Publishing Non Fiction by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses

The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan

Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging

Nathan Scott McNamara visits Renee Gladman at her home in Connecticut to discuss loneliness, love, and her invented city of Ravicka.

"Ravicka, like Samuel Delany’s city of Bellona, has undergone or is undergoing a terrible crisis, the particulars of which are hauntingly elusive. Moving through Ravicka, we often experience a simultaneous sense of wonder and loss. In The Ravickians, Gladman writes:

The papers today report our population at 245,873, the same for the last twelve days. The news is indicative of so may things; we are proud to say that no one has fled in that many days, no one has died (or been found to have died); we are less proud to say that, in this time, we have had no immigrants. The number 245,873 is only an eighth of Ravicka’s past registry. We had so many people.

The deft compression of joy and tragedy and the cosmic sense of time and space often provide the stunning effect of Gladman’s writing."

Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany (2015) is a collection of 33 pieces of short fiction, essays, and creative non-fiction by a group of global writers in honor of author Samuel R. "Chip" Delany, coinciding with his retirement from his career of university teaching.

She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ and helped to develop critical race theory, now her life’s work is under attack by Washington’s war

"In legal terms, the problem came into focus when Crenshaw came across a 1976 case in which an African American woman was denied the ability to bring a discrimination claim against her employer on the grounds that the law could recognise race or gender, but not both at once. Her experience – specifically of being discriminated against as a Black woman – fell through the cracks and the case was thrown out of court. In 1989, Crenshaw identified this form of compound discrimination and gave it a name: intersectionality."

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Dhalgren: Samuel Delany, afrofuturism, & black SF