Jasper Lauderdale

My dissertation proposes that the critical and artistic paradigm I call Black radical alterity illuminates and coalesces oppositional, subversive, and utopian aesthetic strategies embedded and deployed in Black speculative art, in particular those works that conceive alternate pasts, presents, and futures. Speculative art, produced throughout the diaspora and across decades, offers potentially limitless possibilities for writing the Black body into existence by circumventing the restrictions of realist representation, thereby countering the shared and systematic denial of history begot by colonial oppression and chattel slavery and allowing for the foundation of new forms of sociocultural consciousness and the maintenance of diasporic communities. I demonstrate that such texts serve not only to produce possible futures, but can also reclaim and retrofit the past and comment radically on the conditions of the present. By drawing together a corpus of works from a wide range of traditions, movements, and forms that center Blackness in fictive accounts and explorations of the fantastic and the otherworldly, I am able to consolidate beneath the banner of Black radical alterity surrealism and science fiction, marvelous realism and horror, in film, television, the novel, and the visual album, pursuing throughout the variously supernatural body (witch, time-traveler, astronaut, alien, android/cyborg, vampire) and focusing especially on the reactive dimension of Black creative expression and the potentially liberatory appropriation of preexisting cultural forms.