Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction: Future Pasts

An analysis of US science fiction, through the lens of critical race theory, that illuminates how the genre offers new directions for serious appraisals of race and racism between yesterday, today, and tomorrow In Race, Law, and Speculative Fiction, Isiah Lavender III takes seriously the theoretical, stylistic, and rhetorical possibilities inherent in the genre of science fiction toward challenging perceptions of race, ethnicity, whiteness, and Blackness in US culture. To do so, he examines works by a wide variety of science fiction writers exploring racial themes―Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Edgar Allan Poe, Mat Johnson (whose Pym is a direct challenge to Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ), Derrick Bell, and others. Locating racial contexts, social categorizations, and cultural patterns in US speculative fiction, Lavender employs the tenets of critical race theory to sight the unanticipated things the genre might have to say about race at the intersection between imaginary laws and how we, as readers, partake in this imagining.