Brigitte Fielder

Early Black Futures

Black people have always dreamed of Black futures. They have done so under duress, in conversation and collaboration, and with hopeful visioning toward generations beyond themselves. This project takes as its frame an early view of what is called “Afrofuturism.” Reading this theory’s uses of the technological and the speculative, I take up “old” tech and forms of faith to bridge conversations between early and more recent understandings of Black people’s relationship to future imagining.

Here I read technologies such as print, streetcars, trains, elevators, flying machines, and dolls in order to show how Black people used these forms of technology to speculate hopefully about the future. The book will pose questions such as: What does it mean to dwell within the future projected by early Black employments of (old) technology? And what does it mean to project our own futures while keeping the past’s deliberate future-imagining—and our place within one of many possible futures—in mind?

I also ask us to look not only to the future, but also to consider our own place as a future that has been projected and created by the early Black future-making I discuss. This book discusses African American children’s literature across periods, exploring and redefining this genre to include the various ways African American writers have addressed children. I will provide close readings of 18th and 19th century African American literature for children and other people and trace continuities to later children’s literature, from the 20th and 21st centuries, in which Black future-making has often been explicitly linked to this early era of Black history.

Brigitte Fielder is a Professor of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she researches and teaches on African American literature and other literature of the long nineteenth century. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020) and a co-founder of Taught by Literature, a Black digital humanities project working to make early Black women intellectual’s work and teaching materials available for students of all ages.Fielder is also co-editor of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Her work-in-progress includes a book about Mildred Taylor’s children’s novel Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry and another about racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century. Her newest work involves explorations of children’s literature and Afrofuturism before the Harlem Renaissance and smaller projects involving birds, flowers, and joy.