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Full text release has been delayed at the author's request until August 02, 2025

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(Re)Writing Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Radical Change in Black Apocalyptic Fiction

Calbert, Tonisha Marie
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0243-3582
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593596843453299

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
This dissertation examines how recent works of Black apocalyptic fiction represent the opportunities and limits of crisis as a driver of radical social change. Black apocalyptic fiction deals explicitly and substantively with what it means to be Black during, and in the aftermath of, apocalypse. It is a subset of the genre of Black speculative fiction, a broad category for texts by the African diaspora that resist purely realist or mimetic representation of the world and encompasses several genres, most commonly science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror. Black speculative fiction has garnered considerable academic interest in recent years and has been recognized as a rich site for analyzing race and racial differences in popular culture. This project joins the emerging critical conversation of scholars such as Isiah Lavender III, Ramon Saldivar, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen Barr, to analyze how Black writers engage with, challenge, and revise the conventions of the speculative genres. However, critical engagement with apocalypse in Black speculative fiction is still relatively sparse, as is scholarship addressing the representations of race and gender in Black apocalyptic fiction. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, I address this gap in current scholarship through a sustained consideration of Black apocalyptic fiction and the intersections of race and gender therein. This dissertation begins to answer the question of how race and gender impact the potential for radical change in the wake of extreme crisis. Literary representations of apocalypse provide one form of what Nnedi Okorafor calls “the distancing and associating effect” of science fiction. They depict familiar spaces made strange through the lens of total destruction. Apocalypse narratives have a long history and have served many functions over time, including articulation of societal anxieties, social critique, and utopian striving. Black apocalyptic fiction extends this work to focus on the impact of apocalypse on those individuals and groups at the margins of society. Fundamentally, these texts recognize that race and gender continue to shape experiences and outcomes for people of color and that ideologies of racism and sexism are as apt to survive as those oppressed by them. At the same time, the destabilizing nature of crisis creates a unique opportunity for profound social change. Looking at Octavia Butler’s Parable series, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, I analyze how these Black speculative authors construct apocalypse in opposition to the racial and gendered violences of their own realities, namely the racial unrest of Los Angeles in the 1990s, the genocidal war in Darfur in the early 2000s, and the false promise of a postracial America during the Obama era. In these narratives, what is and is not possible in the wake of apocalypse often comes down to a clash between the imagined futures of the multiply marginalized and the idealized past of those benefitting most from current systems of power. Ultimately, I argue that the historical weight of oppressions tied to Black female and male identity constrict the utopian potential of apocalypse.
Martin Ponce (Advisor)
Lynn Itagaki (Committee Member)
Brian McHale (Committee Member)
320 p.
African American Studies; African Americans; African Literature; American Literature; Black History; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Literature; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Modern Literature
apocalypse; afrofuturism; black speculative fiction; science fiction; speculative fiction; Octavia Butler; Nnedi Okorafor; Colson Whitehead; apocalyptic fiction; Parable of the Sower; Parable of the Talents; Who Fears Death; The Book of Phoenix; Zone One

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Calbert, T. M. (2020). (Re)Writing Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Radical Change in Black Apocalyptic Fiction [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593596843453299

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Calbert, Tonisha. (Re)Writing Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Radical Change in Black Apocalyptic Fiction . 2020. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593596843453299.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Calbert, Tonisha. "(Re)Writing Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Radical Change in Black Apocalyptic Fiction ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1593596843453299

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1593596843453299
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.