Darkies Never Dream: Race, Racism, and the Black Imagination in Science Fiction

Abstract

This paper explores the putative lack of black engagement with science fiction (SF) as readers and writers. It argues that although blacks have been writing and reading science fiction since the genre’s inception, this has generally not been recognized due in part to perdurable stereotypes of blacks as lacking sufficient imaginative power to enjoy SF as readers or to produce it as writers, as well as to stereotypes from both within and outside of the genre that characterize it as an intellectually challenging but puerile escapism unsuited to blacks who must preoccupy themselves with the daily realities of real-world oppression. Although black readers and writers of SF remain numerically small, I argue that black engagement with the genre has been marked not by absence but by invisibility, that is, by a failure of both those within and outside of it to perceive its presence.