MELUS 2026: Speculation on the Margins
Austin, TX | April 3-6
Speculation, in modern finance, is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. Does this apply also to science fiction? 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 storytelling can imagine the future differently. It can exhume and rethink the past. And it can comment on the present, furnishing us with an alternative set of possibilities for knowing and being. As N.K. Jemisin notes in The Paris Review, “...so much of American society is dedicated to weaving the illusion that what you see is not actually what is happening. 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” today presents an approach to world-making as imaginative resistance. Alongside the literary interventions of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, N.K. Jemisin, and others, critics from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and expertise have similarly embraced the speculative as a mode of risky thought and anti-racist, feminist, and/or queer critique. We think here of 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—multiethnic U.S. writers have written themselves into speculative worlds. What does it mean to speculate about, on, and in the precarious conditions of the current moment? What are the possibilities and parameters of speculative texts and acts? We welcome scholars working on the forms and politics of contemporary speculative fiction genres—science fiction, fantasy, romantasy, magical realism, utopian and dystopian literature, voodoo, ghost stories—as well as those attending to the ways that speculation, as a methodology and a mode of expression, produces border-crossing mutant assemblages. Possible topics might include:
-historically marginalized forms of speculative literature such as graphic narratives/comics
-the continued rise in historical and speculative fiction
-speculation and risk (risky thought, financial risk)
-speculation and worlding
-social media and the role of the “popular” in speculative literatures
-the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict
-Black Lives Matter protests
-anti-trans laws and politics
-ICE raids and current immigration policies
-post-9/11 surveillance culture
-the destruction and/or the revisions of Black history in the US
-state violations of treaties with Native communities
Please send 250-300 word abstracts and a short bio to jshelat@ursinus.edu and emmy.waldman@gmail.com
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).