MELUS 2026: Speculation on the Margins
Austin, TX | April 3-6
If, as Gloria Anzaldua claims, “nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads,” then the stakes of speculative narrative must be high. “Speculative fiction quickens our imaginations,” writes Steven Shaviro; “it envisions future ways of being that are different from that of the present, and discontinuous with it.” In fact, futurity itself, as that which is not yet fully determined, can only be grasped speculatively—fictionally, allusively, and obliquely. But speculation is not limited to projections of futurity. As the creation of possible worlds, speculative narrative can also exhume the past, reweaving the silences of the archive into alternative accounts. And it can open up new ways of thinking, knowing, being, and relating in the present. “So much of American society is dedicated to weaving the illusion that what you see is not actually what is happening,” N.K. Jemisin notes in The Paris Review, “The endless excuse-making is part of our mythologizing these days. But fixing that is part of the job that science fiction and fantasy can do.”
In its contemporary travels across the borders of medium, genre, and voice, the “speculative” presents an approach to world-making as imaginative resistance. Critics from across disciplinary backgrounds have similarly embraced the speculative as a mode of risky thought and anti-racist, feminist, and/or queer critique: Fred Moten’s “speculative practice,” Aimee Bahng’s work on “decolonized” and “migrant” speculation, Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” Marleen S. Barr’s “feminist fabulation,” Tavia Nyong’o’s “afro-fabulation,” and Joseph Pierce’s “speculative relations,” among others. Buoyed by this critical raft of orientations, our panel proposes to explore how—and why—Black U.S. writers have written themselves into speculative worlds. What are the possibilities and parameters of speculative texts and acts now, in the precarious conditions of our present moment? How do contemporary writers take up and revise the forms and politics of existing speculative fiction genres—science fiction, fantasy, romantasy, magical realism, utopian and dystopian literature, voodoo, ghost stories? In what ways might contemporary speculation on the margins produce new realities?
First, Jay Shelat’s paper examines how the larger-than-life superheroes of N.K. Jemisin’s novel curb encroaching forms of racialized gentrification. The paper articulates how a queer speculation–a radical form of transracial organizing–unsettles the heteronormative expectations and norms rooted in imperial landgrabs through gentrification. Matthew Molinaro deviates from the queer speculation that Shelat investigates by considering how the realist short story form itself “affords an ambivalent and expansive view of Black life’s ordinary textures” against unremarked anti-Black state violence. Putting into conversation literary production and the collective labor of speculation, he reads Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection Friday Black, Molinaro to suggest that “studying Black fiction in this frame attunes us to the transformation of literary radicalism’s genres and futures.”
Emmy Waldman’s paper steers our panel from the verbal to the visual, from prose fiction to the visual (popular) culture of comics in its ambiguous interaction with the high-cultural spaces of art. Through close attention to a range of visual narrative works by Miami-born artist Mark Thomas Gibson, this paper reveals the vibrancy at the border of comics and the fine arts as a locus of the black radical tradition. The panel closes out by taking to the skies. Joanna Davis-McElligatt reads how the myth of the Flying African is Black speculative technology that “anticipates fugitivity of all sorts—flights of fancy, movements of the mind, transfigurations of the body and spirit, escapes and altered states.” Reading a number of Black comics, including Hugo Martínez’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, among others, Davis-McElligatt argues that the Flying African is a visual-narrative mode of resistance to state forms of anti-Blackness that also offers visions of new possible futures.
Jay Shelat, Ursinus College
The gaping maw left in the absence of the Twin Towers after 9/11 changed the face of the city. But 9/11 also opened the door for politicians to advance galling new laws that sent gentrification into hyperdrive. The gentrification laws passed after 9/11, especially in New York City, “capitaliz[ed] upon human suffering through new capital projects in the unfolding shock and disorientation of a collapsing world,” and subsequently allowed for racialized hyperpolicing and monitoring, as Thomas Heise has argued. Take Mayor Bloomberg’s infamous 311 phone service, which allowed New York residents to make noise complaints. Public establishments from bars and clubs to restaurants and bakeries were slapped with exorbitant noise complaint fines. Rents rose, and the financial upkeep forced businesses to shutter. Attempting to seduce the rich to invest in a “broken New York,” Bloomberg changed the face of neighborhoods using pointedly discriminatory processes.
This paper speculates how this post-9/11 gentrification is depicted in N.K. Jemisin’s novel The City We Became and how a team of queer, transracial superheroes must band together to save the city from an intergalactic white supremacist gentrifier. I read how the speculative mode in Jemisin’s 2020 novel highlights the violent, territorial, racialized, and imperial logics of what I term domestic denial: state-enforced, legally backed, removal from home. Establishing a queer speculation, which imagines differences—in history, culture, and being—as synecdochical, as part of a collective whole, I ultimately limn how dismantling domestic denial by rewriting understandings of home, solidarity, and resistance is an act of queer radicality. To halt gentrification, I assert, requires a speculation that dares to disrupt.
Jay Shelat is an Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus College. His book—Domestic Denial: Terror, Race, and Home—is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. His work has appeared in ASAP/Review, MELUS, Studies in American Fiction, and elsewhere.
Matthew Molinaro, University of Toronto
The twenty-first century has seen an explosion of interest in Black speculations. From debates over Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism to scholarly articles and public exhibits thinking about Black science fiction at the end of the world, speculating while Black provides crucial insights on the ways out of this anti-Black world and toward the formation of a new one. Most recently, readers traced Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower set in 2024 to the dystopic conditions that she predicted: amid the devastating California fires, a “Make America Great Again” revival emerged that same year. This uncanny temporal lag, however, tells us more about the uses and misuses of African American literary aesthetics: Taking Black science fiction as a salve, I contend, conceals more than it reveals.
If we accept that “Octavia taught me,” we need a heuristic to understand how the prophetic impulse of Black speculation does not easily account for the shifting logics of surveillance and incarceration that underpin contemporary racial capitalism. Said another way, what might it mean to think Black speculative labours through a minor key? My paper turns to the short stories of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in Friday Black (2018) to theorize not the exceptional or spectacular work of Black speculative aesthetics, but rather how the genre affords an ambivalent and expansive view of Black life’s ordinary textures. Saturated by the law and market’s warfare, Adjei-Brenyah’s stories centre on characters grappling with the simple, eerie tableau of Black living wherein state-sanctioned murder goes unremarked, individualism unchallenged. In Black Lives Matter’s first iteration, Friday Black draws into tension literary production and speculation’s collective labour, what Alys Eve Weinbaum calls a Black feminist philosophy of history and Justin Mann names worldbreaking. Studying Black fiction in this frame attunes us to the transformation of literary radicalism’s genres and futures.
Matthew Molinaro (he/him) is a PhD student in English/Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. His current project traces how writers, intellectuals, and artists reimagined the gender and sexual politics of Black internationalism. Matthew’s writing explores themes of solidarity, liberation, and above all, the aesthetic and political life of the Black radical imagination. His reporting for The Local on the threats to trans rights in Toronto won a Journalists for Human Rights fellowship, and his master’s research on the choral poetics of Black feminist literary history received the Linda Munk Graduate Futures scholarship.
Emmy Waldman, University of Miami
Mark Thomas Gibson is a Miami-born Black artist, professor, and self-described American history buff based in Philadelphia. Working across artistic media, including drawing, painting, print, sculpture, and hand-drawn animation, Gibson evolves his dystopian vision of America at present, a culture locked in a conversation about return and renewal. For Gibson, antiblackness is not an historical wrong for which the nation is attempting to make amends; rather, it’s a permanent fixture of US society: infectious, like a self-consuming virus or curse; cyclical, like the strong tides of history that Fernand Braudel theorized beneath the cresting of current events. Nevertheless, Gibson’s speculative visual narratives refuse to plunge us into melancholic pessimism. Even when it places us at or after the end of the world, as in the shipwreck imagined in his recent show, The Voyage, Gibson’s work urges us to press onwards and outwards towards collective change. There’s no going back, Gibson suggests: the return to origins, for Black Americans, spells a return to enslavement, dislocation, and trauma. At a certain point, there’s only the voyage ahead.
Spanning across several decades of work, this paper examines how Gibson brings together an eclectic range of influences (caricature, comic books, history painting, the afro-surreal, science fiction and fantasy) in the service of realizing what Tavia Nyong’o has called “black counter-speculation,” or the “use of fiction to reveal features of a social condition that could not be articulated in formal legal argument, and to offer up psychological evidence that might be deemed inadmissible in a court of law.” In his comics-form "artist books," Some Monsters Loom Large (2016) and Early Retirement (2017), as in his more recent Town Crier and The Voyage series, which unfold as a series of large-scale political cartoons-as-paintings, Gibson gathers and speaks through symbols of the present and the past in order to authorize a future that has never truly existed. Through close readings of Gibson’s fluid practice, this paper seeks to position the comics/art border as a rich site for the black radical imagination now.
Emmy Waldman is an incoming assistant professor at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Previously, she was a visiting assistant professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her first book, Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press this May.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt, University of North Texas
The legend of The Flying African in the folklore of the Black diaspora is inherently speculative: in the story, a certain number of Africans, upon arriving on the shores of the Americas, step off the boat and immediately fly away across the ocean back home. The particulars vary, depending on where you are coming from—Cuba, Jamaica, South Carolina. Flight is sometimes considered to be an ancestral trait, an individual or collective ability, made possible with the aid of salt, or by growing wings, at times, or by transforming into a buzzard. At its root, scholars have understood the legend as an allegorical or metaphorical longing for escape, for a desire to enter into the conditions of fugitivity, to bring about the conditions of freedom, and to reverse the violence of the Middle Passage. As a literary trope, the figure of the fugitive, as Saidiya Hartman has argued, “dream[s] of an elsewhere,” and characterized by their “ongoing struggle to escape.” As a Black speculative technology, the myth of the Flying African anticipates fugitivity of all sorts—flights of fancy, movements of the mind, transfigurations of the body and spirit, escapes and altered states. In this talk I offer a reading of a cluster of Black comics—Milestone Media’s Icon, Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, and Sanford Greene, Chuck Brown, and David Walker’s Bitter Root—in order to demonstrate how Black comics continue to respond to, reshape, and reimagine the Flying African as a visual-narrative mode of resistance to white supremacy, racial capitalism and penal colonialism, and the death-logics of the antiblack state. I suggest that the figure, trope, allegory, and legend of the Flying African in Black comics anticipates (and at times fulfills) desires for the freedom of unfettered movement, frames the politics of fugitivity and resistance as a radical spectacular praxis, and offers new ways of thinking through—and making possible—Black futures.
Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of North Texas. Her monograph Black Aliens: Narrative Spacetime in the Cosmic Diaspora, is forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press. She is the co-editor of four volumes: Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (UP of Mississippi 2022), BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence (UP of Mississippi 2024), bell hooks’ Radical Pedagogy: New Visions of Feminism, Justice, Love, and Resistance in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2025).