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Notes
1 Jessica Hurley and N.K Jemisin, “An Apocalypse Is a Relative Thing: An Interview with N.K. Jemisin,” ASAP Journal 3, no. 3 (2018): 469.
2 Darieck Scott, Keeping it Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics (New York: New York University Press, 2022), 39.
3 Hurley and Jemisin, “An Apocalypse Is a Relative Thing ,” 476.
4 Nazera Sadiq Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 11.
5 Ruth Nicole Brown, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 188.
6 Lavender elaborates further: “The African American and historical condition is inherently the stuff of science fiction. That is to say that nearly all Black writing is sf because of Black people’s perceived and experienced dislocation in the Western world dating back to the transatlantic slave trade”: Isaiah Lavender, Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 37–38.
7 See andré carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). carrington considers the “speculative fiction of blackness” against the paradox of the whiteness of science fiction to examine the embedded racialization of the genre and the particularities through which Blackness in particular becomes the backdrop of fictional imaginaries.
8 See Sadiq Wright, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century, 12. Also see Nazera Sadiq Wright, “Black Girl Interiority in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love,” The Black Scholar 50, no. 4 (2020): 5–16. For more literature on Black Girlhood Studies, see this critical bibliography curated by Tammy C. Owens, Durell M. Callier, Jessica L. Robinson, and Porshé R. Gardner, “Towards an Interdisciplinary Field of Black Girlhood Studies,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 6, no.3 (2017), 116–32.
9 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), xi; Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of The Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 132.
10 Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 156.
11 I use science fantasy here as one of the many terms used to describe the novel: apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, high fantasy, and fantasy fiction. I am most interested in the ways the novel has been described as science fantasy, resting on the edges of a number of sub-genres in order to render clear the scale of environmental catastrophe and those who are rendered most vulnerable to harm. There is something to be said, perhaps, about Jemisin’s genre-bending in this case, as part also in a lineage of Black women writers who play with form (including Octavia Butler, who also struggled with how editors had a hard time “placing” her books within a genre). To consider Jemisin here as on the “fringe” of fantasy illustrates the ways she plays with narration to not only consider how the world is built but also at whose expense.
12 N.K. Jemisin. The Fifth Season (New York: Orbit Press, 2015), pre-prologue.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 1.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 8.
18 Ibid., 151.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Hurley and Jemisin, “An Apocalypse Is a Relative Thing ,” 470–71.
22 Ibid.
23 Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 8.
24 Darieck Scott, “Fantasy,” in Keywords for Comics Studies, ed. Ramzi Fawaz, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, and Shelley Streeby (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 93.
25 Qiana Whitted. “‘And the Negro Thinks in Hieroglyphics’: Comics, Visual Metonymy, and the Spectacle of Blackness.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5, no. 1 (2014): 86.
26 Karama Horne, “Podcast: N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell describe the world of a powerful new Green Lantern” (The Blerdgurl, 2021) https://theblerdgurl.com/comics/n-k-jemisin-and-jamal-campbell-describe-the-world-of-a-powerful-new-green-lantern/
27 N.K. Jemisin, Far Sector #1 (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2021).
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Rebecca Wanzo, “The Superhero: Meditations on Surveillance, Salvation, and Desire,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009), 93. Also see Rebecca Wanzo, “It’s a Hero? Black Comics and Satirizing Subjection,” in The Black the Ink, ed. Frances Gateword and John Jennings (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 314.
33 N.K. Jemisin, Far Sector #5 (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2021).
34 Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, Space Is the Place (New York: Plexifilm, 2003).
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Kiana T. Murphy
Kiana T. Murphy is a scholar-artist and Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brown University. Her work focuses on Black speculative aesthetics, Black girlhood studies, visual culture, and Black women’s archives. She is working on a project on Black girlhood and literary and visual representations, and a project considering Black women writers’ archives focusing on Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, and Hortense Spillers. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Black Scholar, American Quarterly, University Press of Mississippi, Oxford University Press, and elsewhere.