Incorporates creative writing and analysis of contemporary African speculative fiction to center dreams as a tool for liberation.

In Decolonial Dreamwork, Jenna Hanchey centers dreaming, both waking and sleeping, to examine how Africanfuturism enables futures beyond the “reality” of what developmental imperatives deem possible. Engaging with the speculative fiction of Tade Thompson, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Sofia Samatar, Moses Ose Utomi, and the Sauúti Collective, Hanchey demonstrates how these works provide a roadmap for decolonial dreaming—imagining beyond the conceptual limits Western paradigms impose. Connecting African and Indigenous thought, Decolonial Dreamwork shows how the labor of imagining beyond coloniality is nonlinear, embodied, emplaced, liquid, and reliant on multiplicities of stories.

As both a scholar and speculative fiction writer, Hanchey blends analysis with examples of her own creative work to demonstrate the importance of not only reading African speculative fiction but joining in and dreaming alongside it. Punctuated with exercises and prompts, Decolonial Dreamwork functions as a participatory workbook for liberation that will that will be as generative for classrooms and book clubs as it is for theory development. We can all tell stories, Hanchey exhorts readers, that break colonial realities and create space for better worlds.

In Dispelling Fantasies, Joy Sanchez-Taylor examines how authors of color, such as R. F. Kuang, N. K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Tasha Suri, Aiden Thomas, Nghi Vo, and Marlon James, among others, offer critical counterpoints to the history of white-dominated, Eurocentric fantasy. The traditional fantasy that these authors are writing against reinforces Christian virtues and colonial, white supremacist structures; Sanchez-Taylor argues that its racial tropes are tied to a history of colonization and Christian missionary practices, with popular fantasy narratives often depicting Indigenous groups as primitive, deviant peoples in need of salvation. Such representations are based on a Western binary of rational versus magical and are influenced by tenets of Christianity, ultimately contributing to depictions of “the dark fantastic” or fantasy worlds where dark and othered characters are implicitly portrayed as evil and irredeemable. Organized around four Christian ideals that appear frequently in Western fantasy texts—virtue, envy, patriarchy, and salvation—Dispelling Fantasies demonstrates how non-Eurocentric fantasy worlds offer alternative versions of morality, race, gender, and sexuality and make space for authors to move away from hierarchical, binary systems of good and evil.

Markley interweaves chapters on science and science fiction, enabling him to illuminate each arena and to explore the ways their concerns overlap and influence one another. He tracks all the major scientific developments, from observations through primitive telescopes in the seventeenth century to data returned by the rovers that landed on Mars in 2004. Markley describes how major science fiction writers—H. G. Wells, Kim Stanley Robinson, Philip K. Dick, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Judith Merril—responded to new theories and new controversies. He also considers representations of Mars in film, on the radio, and in the popular press. In its comprehensive study of both science and science fiction, Dying Planet reveals how changing conceptions of Mars have had crucial consequences for understanding ecology on Earth.