“Fantastic Climates”, Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in the Fantastic
Kassel (Allemagne)
5-7 Septembre 2024
Date limite de soumission : 31 mars 2024
“Be worried. Be very worried” read the headline of a 2006 special edition of Time Magazine, referring to the ongoing environmental crisis: melting ice caps and rising sea levels, droughts, pandemics, mass extinctions, and global climate migration – a list that is far from exhaustive. Every year, not only scientists and climate activists but also recurring extreme weather events and environmental catastrophes remind us of the potentially apocalyptic consequences of our mindless exploitation of non-renewable resources and destructive influence on planetary ecosystems. As the greatest existential threat of our time, anthropogenic climate change has been a part of sociopolitical discourse for decades. Yet social awareness has not resulted in sufficient societal or political consequences necessary to change those lifestyle habits which have so far rendered us incapable of responding to the problem.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the blockbuster cinematic world of Wakanda, Black futures proliferate—hypervisible in sci-fi casting, in reading lists for liberal audiences, in political discourses of anti-racism and their backlash. But imagining Black futures is not, in fact, a new (pre)occupation in Black literature and expressive culture. World-building, utopic and prophetic aesthetic strategies, investments in speculative genres, and fantastic formulations of Black being abound in the history and present of African American literature. This guest-edited issue seeks to engage and trouble the contemporary boom in Black futures while also renarrating the archive of African American literary and cultural expression through its lens.
Marc Atallah (dir.),
Alison Peirse
Clive Bloom, 
