The Black Male Body in Early African American Science Fiction

Abstract

Marlene Allen’s essay explores the bodies of Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave through the focus of late nineteenth-century debates about race determinism. Sutton Grigg’s Imperium in Imperio extrapolates the nature and nurture dichotomy into a fantastical counter-history of race war in America, refuting pseudo-scientific discourses of black intellectual inferiority.