Beyond the Colonial Ever-Present: Black-Centred Science Fiction and the Possibility of Racial Justice

I am a massive science fiction fan. Always have been. Will probably always be. I think the only things I have liked longer than science fiction are reading and singing. Original Doctor Who [1963-1989] was one of my very first introductions to the genre. One of the reasons that I love this genre is because the idea of imagining a world beyond what we think is possible has always appealed to me. Over the last couple of years, in my work, I have become increasingly interested in using the tools provided by Black-centred science fiction to think through the possibility of the end of racism. This is particularly significant because a close study of the structural nature of racism leads one to suggest that ending racism means an end to the world as we know it—underwritten as it is by extreme inequality and racial injustice.

This line of questioning has found its way into an open access article on teaching in law and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a chapter on imaginative resistance to racial injustice through the lens of the speculative, as well as another chapter in which I use speculative fiction to imagine how the sea would judge humanity for its destructive tendencies. I have blogged specifically about the last one on this blogsite. It has been refreshing to also see in the same time frame use of these devices in “mainstream” small and big stream offerings. The Black Panther movies within the MCU are a key example [see further below]. The first season of Supacell [2024] had just been released as I started writing this essay. With my work and in this essay, I seek to question the incommensurability of racial justice within the terms of Euro-modern law. Despite our presumption that the law is inherently aligned with the production of liberty, freedom, justice, and human equality, our experience of the world (especially as regards the intractability of racism) testifies to the contrary. Is it possible that the terms of Euro-modern law are insufficient to fulfil its own lofty promises? If so, what other media could we possibly use to speculate on the fulfilment of those promises?

Law, Knowledge and the Epistemological Entrenching of Racial Injustice

The historical and continued use and manipulation of artificially produced racial categories developed through and beyond the colonial encounter continue to produce racial injustice in the present. Through regulating and defining who is human and what is space-time, the meanings and devices of what I call Euro-modern law help to solidify the effects of dispossession, dehumanisation and over-exploitation. Euro-modern law makes the structure of the world we live in, including its inequalities and injustices, seem natural and inevitable. Yet this world it makes is characterised by the reproduction of extreme, though manufactured, inequality, as well as the quickening acceleration of ecological disaster.

The invention of the concept of ‘race’ was a key tool that redefined and redefines what it means to be human. This redefinition and restriction were extended, with the law’s complicity, to the relationship of the racialised to land, other forms of property, and to time. For example, in cases such as Wi Parata v. The Bishop of Wellington [1877] and Re Southern Rhodesia [1919], the different law courts that heard these cases decided that the land on which indigenous people had existed for generations could not conceivably be “legally” owned by them. This argument was based on the idea that those indigenous peoples and their ways of living were considered to be too backward to aspire to the lofty ideas of property ownership within Euro-modern law. These types of judgments relied on a racially contingent reading of the past to un-recognise the shared temporalities of the indigenous people with their colonisers as equally legitimate legal agents. This not only physically dislocated them from their land but also nullified any legal agreements that had been made, the past sovereignty of indigenous peoples, as well as their future possibilities. So, when we call indigenous, colonised, or racialised people “timeless”, we are leaning into the effects of the colonial project that reveal the literal meaning of the word ‘timeless’. For these people, being timeless has quite literally meant being out of time or without time. It has become an alibi for annihilation. There are similar examples across legal language and other academic literature that illustrate how deeply racial injustice underwrites the current structure of the world. The pertinent question for us is how we reveal, describe, and exit this underwriting of this necropolitical landscape. Science fiction could possibly provide us with some ideas.

Why Science Fiction?

Unlike law, which is characterised by the need for certainty and predictability, science fiction is predicated on breaking those rules of certainty to go beyond what is considered inevitable destiny. Therefore, the scope it provides for creatively thinking of possible futures can be a space where we can imagine and build a different future from the one presented to us as inevitable. Both the content and tools of science fiction are useful in the task. Using the tools of science fiction to think about racial justice in particular is very helpful, as it helps us understand how social constructs work and thus can be “unworked.” The idea that certain conditions of humanity are inevitable becomes open to question. So, science fiction can be regarded as imaginative resistance to the devastating effects of linear liberal time and its inability to imagine justice as future-facing. We can use its tools and content to imagine and build a future world in which racial injustice and climate catastrophe are not inevitable. The alternative is to be eternally trapped in what I have called the “colonial-ever-present”, where the dehumanising, extractive, and exploitative logics concretised as normal by the colonial project remain in charge of global conditions. Science fiction is, therefore, a major site for contemplating the possibilities for emergence of dystopias and utopias. Through this genre, writers have also considered how law would handle new technological innovations and raised relevant questions that can only be raised outside of the confines of the strict boundaries of legal writing.

Despite the “glories” I have outlined in the previous paragraph, a lot of mainstream science fiction has failed to adequately address the problem of racial injustice—if it is addressed at all. Utopias and dystopias are created in ways that ignore the entrenchment and continuity of racial injustice woven into the fabric of our current realities. Blade Runner [1982]. Gattaca [1997]. Oblivion [2013]. Bridgerton [2020-]. In these imagined futures, racism and all its afterlives seemed to have melted away mysteriously. A limited appreciation of the social utility of race to the production of the colonial-ever-present means that many of its white writers ignore the ways in which race and colonialism must inform the utopian or dystopian futures they posit. The presumption that the passage of time makes progress and antiracism inevitable proceeds from a fundamental misunderstanding. These creations begin their worldmaking from an incomplete and distorted image of the present-now, to construct futures and pasts that cannot possibly eventuate. In almost direct response to these gaps, racialised peoples have always found ways to make sure their art responds to the actual fabric of their lives. As regards science fiction, this has happened via many genres, such as Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. Two of my writings explore the contributions of these distinct genres; however, for the purposes of this essay, I am using the umbrella term “Black-Centred Science Fiction” to encompass the ground they cover.

What are the themes present in Black-Centred Sci-Fi?

Black-centred sci-fi describes a wide range of science fiction and fantasy forms that have originated from African and African-descended people. These literary forms seek to use the speculative writing of science fiction to centre the experiences, philosophies, and hopes of Black/African people. It should be noted that the origins and indeed composite aims of the sub-genres of BCSF are not often unified. Some writers seek to imagine equality within the current structure of the world. Some seek to subvert it. Some writers are full of hope; some consider apocalypse the only hope. Writers may draw on existing mythologies from the African continent or fill the gaps of what has been lost to the Middle Passage. (See this post for further examination of the disjunctures between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism.)

Examples of these types of works include The Rape of Shavi [1983] by Buchi Emecheta, who uses allegorical writing to describe the impact of colonialism on a fictional African country, Shavi. Another example is Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀ [1950], written by Daniel Fágúnwà in Yorùbá. Ògbójú Ọdẹ describes a hunter’s quest in a forest of spirits, extolling virtues of courage and perseverance. In Lagoon [2014], Nnedi Okorafor seeks to use African communal philosophies to reimagine alien invasion as a means to build joint prosperity in ways that do not replicate colonial dispossession and saviourism. In Bloodchild [1984], Octavia Butler imagines humans beyond the current definition of the body. In Kindred [1979], Butler uses time-travel to collapse the past and the present and demonstrate the ways in which the erasures of the realities of the racially traumatic past of the world, have produced in the present an abdication of responsibility for the future. In Song of Solomon [1977], Toni Morrison tells the story of an enslaved person who was said to possess the power of flight.

As I mentioned earlier, works within BCSF can be very different in their origins, drivers and messages. But what connects these artforms is that they can and do provide transcendental, shared and ultimately political spaces and devices for Africa and her Diasporas to collectively confront, question, unveil and reinvent the nature of humanity and Euro-modernity in ways that centre the reality, interests, pasts and futures of Black people. These writers are often posing existential questions of how humanity can depart on the wings of African imaginings of time and temporality, from the inevitable colonial-ever-present, into a future in which Africa and her Diasporas survive, thrive and flourish as themselves. The readers and viewers are an essential part of this metalogue. How we watch/read, what we notice, what we take away and what we do next is an important part of this ongoing process of bringing forth new worlds. In essence, much of Black-centred Sci-Fi’s political work is done by ‘enlisting readers to consider various possibilities, to speculate upon the idea of the future’.

How We Watch Contemporary Black-Centred Science Fiction: A reprise of Black Panther [2018] 

Inviting the reader/watcher into the subjunctive and speculative nature of BCSF can sometimes be limited by how those devices are [not] put to service of the narrative. The Black Panther movies use counterfactuals to invite their viewers to take a better look at their role within the colonial ever-present. Counterfactual histories are, “alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred.” (Evans 2013: xv). Counterfactual histories are often used in stories of racial and other social [in]justice to posit the end of that injustice. In those instances, they sometimes invite the dominant group to step into the shoes of the oppressed group. For example: What if women ruled the world? What if the Earth had not been placed in ecological danger? What if there was no disease or hunger or war? Thus, counterfactuals invite us to consider alternative possibilities to perditions we currently face. They are a means by which we can strive to change what we have now, through visions of possible futurity. Nevertheless, counterfactuals fail as reconstructive imagination for present action, when they have “no grounding” then they are “merely an act of imagination, and unconstrained imagination at that.” (Bunzl 2004: 845). Despite the glories of Black Panther (which I wrote about when it was released), its counterfactual often falls short of imagining a different structure. Its narrative relies on the same economic and political imperatives of capital, conquest, governance and military structures that Euro-modernity asks us to accept as settled. There is an overreliance on uncomfortable story-telling tropes of resource-rich ‘lost worlds’ which had been made popular in colonial-era novels. Furthermore, by fictionalising this advanced nation as a contrast to African penury and need, ‘Wakanda’ ultimately consigns its ‘Africa’ to darkness. Yet paradoxically, viewers, especially those racialised Black, often felt empowered after a viewing. But did that extend beyond the affective?

Nevertheless, science fiction dystopias that invoke racism and white supremacist structures are additionally interesting social commentaries because our experience of watching them differs and is also affected by our prior experience of different forms of racism. A really good example of this is the 2024 episode of Doctor Who titled Dot and Bubble. It was interesting to see online reactions that indicated a racial divide to the point in the episode when viewers clocked the twist. Racialised viewers were more likely to notice the subtle microaggressions from the very beginning. White viewers less so.

Faced as we are with a world where discussions of racial injustice are appearing in places they did not use to, as viewers and readers, we have a wider task than just being entertained and momentarily empowered. Another world is possible but also necessary. If we are to survive the perdition of the colonial ever-present – its violence, environmental catastrophe and necropolitics – then we have a responsibility to do all we can to build these worlds. That task starts in our imagination. We must imagine ourselves as possible. We must imagine the world we know can be possible. Then we build it.

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