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In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, the cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the wake of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. Tracking how the bodies that were speculated in as commodities became speculative bodies, he develops an account of black fabulation that is always already feminist and queer. In so doing, he revises accounts of post-humanism and new materialism that ignore the subversive potential of life lived outside the sovereign coordinates of the human. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a black polytemporality is invented and sustained. “Angular sociality” names the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself, providing its internal dynamism and drama. To outline his theory of afro-fabulation, Nyong’o takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.

Emergent Worlds reframes the modernity of nineteenth-century America by displacing three central critical narratives about the era: the westward spread of imperialism, the redemptionist story of black freedom, and the notion that the United States constituted a new world. It begins by identifying dissonant forms of time that ought not to have existed if these three metanarratives were total: chance on a Pacific whaling vessel, a calm on a Caribbean slave ship, and a near apocalypse on an Atlantic merchant ship. These oceanic times provide a gateway into larger historical and geographical frames. They reveal that nineteenth-century America existed in historical interstices in the world-system: between colonialism and the nation, slavery and freedom, subject and citizen, old world and new. With this historical repositioning, Emergent Worlds makes visible a series of transitional ideologies and figures that emblematize them, such as the queer migrant, the suspended state, and the living dead, which are passed over if the modernity of the era is assumed. Such configurations in turn produced symptomatic forms of consciousness oriented around the perception of time. These four domains—oceanic space, transitional historical position, emergent ideology, and dissonant time—created the conditions of possibility for three previously uncataloged genres of the 1850s: the Pacific elegy, the black counterfactual, and the immigrant gothic. Emergent Worlds thus carries out a generic reclassification that brings together this international mix of canonical and noncanonical books of the 1850s, showing how they internalized and attempted to transcend their own historical conditions of possibility.

Old Futures traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media. Centering works by women, queers, and people of color that are marginalized within most accounts of the genre, the book offers a new perspective on speculative fiction studies while reframing established theories of queer temporality by arguing that futures imagined in the past offer new ways to queer the present. Imagined futures have been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures rewrites the history of the future by gathering together works that counter such narratives even as they are part of them. Lothian explores how queer possibilities are constructed and deconstructed through extrapolative projections and affective engagements with alternative temporalities. The book is structured in three parts, each addressing one convergence of political economy, theoretical framework, and narrative form that has given rise to a formation of speculative futurity. Six main chapters focus on white feminist utopias and dystopias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; on Afrofuturist narratives that turn the dehumanization of black lives into feminist and queer visions of transformation; on futuristic landscapes in queer speculative cinema; and on fan creators’ digital interventions into televised futures. Two shorter chapters, named “Wormholes” in homage to the science fiction trope of a time-space distortion that connects distant locations, highlight current resonances of the old futures under discussion.

Postracial Resistance: Black Women and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity looks at how, in the first Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse—the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both Whites and people of color—in order to resist its very tenets. Black women’s resistance to disenfranchisement has a long history in the U.S., including struggles for emancipation, suffrage, and de jure and de facto civil rights. In the Michelle Obama era, some minoritized subjects used a different, more individual form of resistance by negotiating through strategic ambiguity. Joseph listens to and watches Black women in three different places in media culture: she uses textual analysis to read the strategies of the Black women celebrities themselves; she uses production analysis to harvest insights from interviews with Black women writers, producers, and studio lawyers; and she uses audience ethnography to engage Black women viewers negotiating through the limited representations available to them. The book arcs from critiquing individual successes that strategic ambiguity enables and the limitations it creates for Black women celebrities, to documenting the way performing strategic ambiguity can (perhaps) unintentionally devolve into playing into racism from the perspective of Black women television professionals and younger viewers.

Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory reassesses the legacy of the Vietnam War through the figure of South Vietnam. More specifically, it offers a reinterpretation of the military policy of Vietnamization. In 1969, Richard Nixon pledged to “Vietnamize” the regional armed conflict in Indochina, placing all responsibility for winning the war onto the South Vietnamese—a “transfer” of power that ended in the swift collapse of the south to northern communist forces in 1975. It recognizes that Vietnamization and the end of South Vietnam signals not just an example of flawed American military strategy but an allegory of power, providing subterfuge for U.S. imperial losses while denoting the inability of the Vietnamese and others to become free, modern liberal subjects on their own. The main thesis of this book is that the collapse of South Vietnam under Vietnamization complicates the already difficult memory of the Vietnam War, pushing more for a better critical understanding of South Vietnamese agency and self-determination beyond their status as the war’s ultimate “losers.” The denial of a viable independent future for South Vietnam produces a compensatory demand for increased South Vietnamese representation, knowledge production, and memory-making. Through a multi-method examination of different case studies, from refugees returning to the homeland to refugee anti-communist politics to refugee participation in the U.S. War on Terror, the book pushes scholars to consider not simply the ways refugees are Vietnamese but how they are Vietnamizing their social landscapes and political environments.

This book offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through the dominant tropes of sexuality. By analyzing particular works of art, each chapter draws our attention to specific aspects of pornotropic (violent and exoticizing) capture that black and brown people must negotiate. These technologies differ, but together, they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. In addition, the book identifies and analyzes moments that exceed these constraints—the sensual excess that is theorized as brown jouissance. Brown jouissance is a political and philosophical intervention into what constitutes selfhood, knowledge, and fleshiness. The book works through several examples of brown jouissance in the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, Xandra Ibarra, Amber Hawk Swanson, Cheryl Dunye, Carrie Mae Weems, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan by dwelling on the analytic possibilities opened by the artwork’s entanglement with the sensual. The sensual, in turn, leads us to imagine possibilities for orienting relationality around queer femininity.