Race, Sex, Politricks, and Belles Lettres

Section five collects Greg Tate’s best literary criticism, on works ranging from novels by Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, and Edward P. Jones to scholarly work by Patricia Hill Collins and biographers of Amiri Baraka and Frantz Fanon. In a final essay, “Kalahari Hopscotch,” Tate reflects on his trajectory as a Black futurist, starting from an obsession with Marvel Comics and Black science-fiction characters as a kid. Tate argues Afro-futurism is about seeing the institutional exclusion, hyperinvisibility, and massive social erasure that Black people face not as impediments but as incitements where Black futurist avatars are inspired to repurpose oppression and re-create the world anew.