“Black Aliens is an astounding study of race, agency, and identity. Davis-McElligatt eloquently and thoroughly argues for the redefining of the term ‘alien’ to reflect the expansiveness and possibilities of Black experiences, Black bodies, and Black culture into outer space and beyond.” —Regina N. Bradley, author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South
“From the surprising conceptualization of history as another planet to her analysis of m/othering through connections between Octavia Butler and Connie Samaras’s art exhibition and catalogue, Davis-McElligatt not only demonstrates a robust research and archival process but makes brilliant use of those pieces through creative juxtaposition and original theorization.” —Vincent Haddad, author of The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967–2023
“Black Aliens is a profound work of scholarship that explores how authors such as Octavia Butler and Sun Ra have developed the extraterrestrial into an inspiration for a cosmic Black kinship and how the alien has also been entangled with the transatlantic slave trade, scientific racism, and astrofuturism. And yes, there are Black aliens, for as Davis-McElligatt astutely shows, you don’t have to be human to be Black. If you’re suffering from the Roswell blues and tired of the space-alien junk our society has proliferated, then come and find solace in Black Aliens.” —Matthew David Goodwin, author of The Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens
“The past might be another country, but according to Black Aliens, history is another planet: where alien encounters make kin, where white heteropatriarchal alienation from above is met with community from below, and where archival corrections and mothership connections historicize and transmolecularize Black lives. Joanna Davis-McElligatt traces Black alien lines of flight, charts a DIY diaspora from this ghetto called Earth, and finds an alter-destiny in the stars. Highly recommended.” —Mark Bould, coeditor of The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction
In Black Aliens, Joanna Davis-McElligatt examines extraterrestrial and interdimensional aliens in Black speculative media and culture, reading them as figural representations of a cosmic diasporic experience and charged metaphors for Black fugitivity and escape. As figures of the enslaved and their descendants, ghosts, time travelers, interstellar voyagers, immortals, and abductees, Black aliens are inherently disruptive figures. In her analysis, Davis-McElligatt foregrounds alien entanglements with terrestrial beings that generate new networks of kinship and relation—genealogical, reproductive, transspecies. As Black extraterrestrials form chosen kin-community with Black Earthlings, they extend the Black Atlantic beyond earthly boundaries.
Analyzing prose, poetry, film, record albums, comic books, illustrations, art installations, and exhibition catalogues, Davis-McElligatt traces how Octavia E. Butler, Maisy Card, Sun Ra, and Dwayne McDuffie and M. D. Bright visualize aliens whose bodies and beings are subject to interpellation as Black on Earth. She argues that these creators intentionally locate the Black alien as a subject whose galactic bonds are constructed in and as narrative form itself, made manifest in plot, characterization, and narrativization. In recasting narrative spacetime, they reimagine Black entanglements, kinship systems, and histories as a cosmic diaspora.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt is Assistant Professor of Black Literary Studies in the Department of English at the University of North Texas. She is the coeditor of bell hooks’s Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom. Her research has appeared in south: a scholarly journal, Mississippi Quarterly, and BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 History as Another Planet: Speculative Histofiction and Constellations of Black Alien Linealogy in Kindred and These Ghosts Are Family
Chapter 2 Black Skin, Human Masks, Alien Form: Narrative Physiognomy, Visual Phenomenology, and Image-Text Representations of (Extra)Terrestriality
Chapter 3 Black Alien M/other: Correcting the Intergalactic Archive
Chapter 4 “I Am Not of This Planet”: The Making of Le Sony’r Ra’s Cosmic Diaspora
Coda Earth Is Ghetto
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
