The Case for Afrofuturism & Black Horror Envisioning Future survival
I have spent my most recent nights laying awake and afraid of the dark. I usually face toward our open door at night. The dark hallway glows from the salt lamp in the hall bathroom. Shadows dance across the floors and walls. As my eyelids gain the weight of fatigue, my mind starts to play games.
I blink quickly and strain my eyes to peer into the hallway. Nothing is there. Was I dreaming? I have been caught in this cycle since I finished The Between, a Black horror book by Tananarive Due. The main character, Hilton, is a Black man with a Black family that lives in Florida. We follow Hilton on a terrifying ride over the course of the novel: he has these horrifying dreams that he can’t remember when he wakes up but that scare him enough to deter him from sleeping. He survives multiple near-death experiences in his dreams and, maybe, in his real life. The line starts to blur for him–is he dreaming? Is he awake? Is he living? Hilton starts to lose touch with reality. It’s difficult to tell whether or not it’s the dreams, the lack of sleep, or the real-life, racist, psychopath who is stalking his family with hopes to kill them. Racism, the veil between life and death, lucid dreams, violence–scary stuff.
So, I lay awake, afraid. Did I really just see a cat in the kitchen? No, that had to be a dream…right? My husband has started to notice my fear–to be fair to me, his observational powers would alert him if my breathing rate increased or decreased. To be fair to him, after I finished The Between, I laid in bed staring up at the ceiling like a corpse on the morgue table. I’m usually pretty lively.
“What’s wrong?” my husband asked. Embarrassment coursed through my body. If he knew the book scared me this bad, he would laugh at my empathic nerdiness: you’re not Hilton, bro.
It’s fine, I’ll lie, I thought. I mentally rehearsed a few lies to see if I could pass his filter and suffer in silence.
The state of the world terrifies me. Nope, I’ve started dreaming faster than Hilton after his third sleepless night in the middle of our conversations about the latest Elon and Trump drama. Try again.
I’m just used to hearing the kids breathing and knowing they are okay, I get unsettled with them in the other room. I laughed at myself. Terrible attempt. The morning after we moved our youngest into the older kids’ room, I woke up like I had been born again after an invigorating dinner with a Black, female god who restored my energy levels back to those of my 20s.
The third time would work like a charm. I just have so much going on with my students and my classroom. More like a curse–two hours before we got in bed, I bragged about not needing to plan anymore because school ends next week. Out of attempts. I conceded–honesty was the best policy.
“I just finished a really, really scary book,” I told him. Answer accepted, filter passed–I had been walking around for the past four days like a screen zombie suffering from an insatiable desire to feed on the words on the tablet.
He didn’t make fun of me, but he did try to make me laugh. I laughed after a couple jokes, but quickly, returned to my paralysis of staring at the ceiling, trying to settle my heartbeat.
He looked at me with concern and skepticism, “It really scared you that bad?”
When we finally turned the lights out, I laid still, unblinking and listening for the sound of my dreams creeping through the house to come get me.
I finally convinced myself that I was safe enough to sleep because Hilton fought back and faced his fears many times throughout the book. If he could face his fears, why couldn’t I?
Plus, maybe the even more convincing reason to go to sleep was my excitement about my growing list of dread-inducing Black horror and expansive Afrofuturism books to read, and my own terrifying stories to write.
My school is making a change to our current elective class which we call “X-Block”. XBlock is a time for students to engage in a thirty-five minute class period of their own choosing–drawing, bracelet-making, journaling, basketball, etc. XBlock is also our least attended class of the day. Because of the dismal attendance and family advocacy to have more academic options that could actually count toward student transcripts, we are ditching XBlock. Instead, teachers are going to teach an “Academic Seminar” class a few times a week. At least, students will still get to choose. And, so will we.
My choice: Afrofuturism and Black Horror in Media and Literature. As soon as I decided, I started my deep dive.
I started with Afrofuturism. I was familiar enough to know that Afrofuturism was, basically, Black sci-fi. However, Afrofuturism is a movement, a community of artists that have been doing this work for decades—not just co-opting the sci-fi space. I wanted to find a definition that honored that movement. l started where most of us would–I Googled “Afrofuturism definition,” and found a general, diluted one written by the Google Dictionary. Luckily, one of the first results was the article, “Afrofuturism: From the Past to the Living Present,” written by Tananarive Due (yes, the Due of the terrifying book that I read!).
Due explained that “Afrofuturism, more concretely, can be understood as a wide-ranging social, political and artistic movement that dares to imagine a world where African-descended peoples and their cultures play a central role in the creation of that world.” I continued to read the article and started to think about the examples I knew of Afrofuturism. The most familiar example of Afrofuturism hit the mainstream in 2018 with the movie release of Black Panther. Every kid dressed in a Black Panther costume, shouting “Wakanda Forevaaaaaa!” helped spread Afrofuturism’s popularity.
A librarian at UCLA, Dalena Hunter, furthered this definition and offered the addition that, ‘the point [of Afrofuturism] is to challenge what it means for Black people to be free on our own terms. Liberation is a very important part of the genre.’ Octavia Butler was highlighted as the most popular, groundbreaking figure in Afrofuturism in literature. I had already read some of her more popular work, like Parable of the Sower, a book about a teen, Lauren Olamina, living in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles that is literally on fire, in 2025. Eerily accurate vision of the future, considering that she wrote this in 1992. What else had she written for us?
I dove headfirst (those signs at the pool–not to dive into the 3 ft end of the pool–are made for people like me) into Octavia Butler’s work. I got myself a digital library app so that I could access more of her work. I returned to her short stories, which I had serendipitously stumbled upon during my teacher credentialing program. Then, I read some of her interviews. Then, I made a list of all the books she mentions in her interviews. Then, I Googled (again) the Huntington Library and started browsing her papers available on the site. Then, I paused in my tracks at a photo of Octavia Butler and a group of other authors. In that photo?
Tananarive Due.
The same one who had written the Afrofuturism article. So, I dove headfirst into Tananarive Due’s work. I inhaled, The Between, which, as I mentioned, has gifted me with many late and fearful nights. Then, I downloaded a collection of her short stories, Wishing Pool and Other Stories. Then, I downloaded a YA anthology of short horror stories, titled, The Black Girl Survives in This One. Tananarive authored the Foreword.
So, some nights, I’m laying awake and afraid of the dark. But other nights, I’m laying awake thinking about the ways that Octavia has built worlds that might exist in the future. Worlds like the Lilith’s Brood series (three novels: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago) where humans have completely destroyed the earth with nuclear weapons and alien lifeforms, the Oankali, saved humans for the small price of breeding with them to create a new species. I wonder if I would have the courage that Lilith, the Black, female character has to learn how to survive with this species and “wake” other humans to encourage them to do the same.
Still, on other nights, I’m thinking about what Tananarive did in her writing to make me sit on the edge of my seat, flipping page after page to figure out why Shana, a __ year old, Black girl, held on to that stone that started to take over her body and also helped her change the course of history on that warm, humid night filled with hate in April 1968 in her short story, “Thursday–Night Shift.”
In my reflection, these stories have scared and disturbed me. But their staying power is in the comfort and the hope they plant in my soul.
Although they don’t know, Tananarive and Octavia mentor me. I have discovered that I can use these same tools–Afrofuturism and Black horror–to imagine my own futures and design my own survival.
And, just like a teacher, I wondered: don’t students need the same space to imagine what the future can be–for better or for worse? Don’t they need to see themselves as survivors that made it to the end because of their own ingenuity?
Octavia says, “I have warned–the Parable novels [Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents] are obviously novels of warning, cautionary tales,” (Interview by Cecilia Tan, Sojourner, 1999, “Possible Futures”).
Shouldn’t my students imagine what could happen if our world keeps going this way? Couldn’t my students leverage their own cultural heritage and the generational wisdom of folx of color to explore and experiment with how our problems of today could be solved?
Isn’t this work of envisioning the future imperative if we have any hope of surviving ourselves? Or even just surviving the night in a horror film, like the vampire film, Sinners?
The California Common Core State Standards dedicate one standard–out of 10–to narrative writing and use only one word, “imagined” to describe the requirement for students to engage in writing fiction. Even in Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, Linda Christensen (who is one of my mentor teacher idols) neglects fictional writing. She explains that narrative writing, although pushed further and further out of curriculum by state standards and standardized testing, is imperative to student growth and a necessity for student learning. However, none of her chapters provide a writing prompt or process for writing fiction.
As I have been reading Afrofuturism and Black Horror and playing with the two genres in my writing, my optimism has increased. I can consume the cortisol-spiking news of the minute with more resilience. My curiosity leads me as I read about the horror happening in the world: what if it didn’t have to be this way? What would a new world look like? What new problems or conflicts would arise? How difficult would it be to maintain that progress? What would it take to completely switch gears and go a different direction?
I have wondered what my students think about while they consume the news at an even faster pace than adults. They don’t monitor their screen time the same way adults do. They don’t filter the memes, gifs, reels, and alerts flooding their phones all day. They don’t get a reprieve as they move from navigating these issues in their information consumption to navigating their manifestations in their own lived experiences.
Some of them say things like, “The world is fucked anyway, why should I care?”
And before we start lecturing them about their language and apathy–can we pause to wonder if we actually blame them? I pride myself on being a responsive educator. But, sometimes, I get bogged down by the content I teach. I start to wonder if PROGRESS is a fictional word, one that belongs to an intergalactic alien language with no true meaning here. Because in our current reality, people who are different, are under heightened attack and earth feels like a pendulum swinging back into the authoritarian side of the galaxy.
We need what Afrofuturism gives us–a reclamation of Black and Indigenous wisdom, used to improve and heal society, often from a science fiction lens. We need what Black Horror gives us–a glimpse at Black survival and often brilliant ways at survival that, unlike the typical horror genre that kills off the only character of color quickly, actually promote the survival and/or healing of other characters.
So, I’m curious about teaching a class that requires students to shake out their imaginations as they pull them out of the black and yellow Costco storage bins of their memories. I’m curious about their willingness to dive into writing a story that solves the climate crisis with all kinds of interterrestrial resources and Indigenous ingenuity. I’m curious to hear what they think about the ways that racism is horror after we get permission slips signed and watch Get Out together.
I’m curious how much truth they will find in Tananarive’s wise words, “Black history is Black horror,” after we watch an episode of Lovecraft Country–a show on HBO Max that blends Afrofuturism and Black Horror to tell the story of Tic, a Black man, trying to protect his family from evil forces (Tananarive Due, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror). Can they find ways to process generational trauma from racism, sexism, colonization, imperialism, homophobia, through writing a cathartic horror story?
So, I’ve been diving deeper into Afrofuturism and Black horror. And yes, my nights have gotten scarier. My husband and I just watched episode 8, “Jig-a-Bobo” of Lovecraft Country. He watched it for the second time, I watched it for the first time. Typing about it makes my heart start to pound harder, pumping blood intensely to my muscles in case I need to fight or run. Both would be necessary if I was in Dee’s position. Arguably the most endearing and definitely the youngest character in Lovecraft, Dee, spends the episode being chased...
...by two “pickaninny” demon girls that no one else can see. They have their own theme song, and they persist.
They.
Keep.
Coming.
A few days later, my husband and I are closing up the house for the night. I pause to look at him.
“What’s up?” he asks, giving me his full attention.
“The first time you watched that Lovecraft episode…how many days until you stopped seeing those girls around the house?” I ask.
He’s thoughtful. “It was awhile. But I had to watch it again because it was so well done. Plus, I watched it when it was new, and Black Twitter went crazy with the two of them.” We both laugh.
We spent time dissecting the deeper meaning of the choice to have the demon girls be portrayed as the “pickaninny” stereotype. Why did they choose that image? Maybe commentary that racial caricatures and stereotypes just won’t die? They follow us around? No one else believes they are there, wreaking havoc on our nervous systems and social status?
But, it’s imperative that all of us see ourselves surviving and outlasting all our individual and collective, internal and external demons.
I finally fall asleep that night when I remember that if the characters can survive, so can I. I can’t wait for my students to write their ingenuity, generational wisdom, and survival into existence.
I hear the nagging voice of Judgment questioning the effectiveness of having students write anything fictional, especially science, speculative, or horror fiction.
“What good is fiction to any student that is not an aspiring writer? Why would any student want to write fiction? Wouldn’t a teenager be ‘too cool for school’ to write a made up story with aliens, science, and technology?” Judgment asks me with a sneer and an eye roll.
I smile with patience and answer Judgment with more questions–they will work, because they are Octavia’s:
“What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing?...At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what ‘everyone’ is saying, doing, thinking–whoever ‘everyone’ happens to be this year.”
Without taking a breath, I give Tananarive’s explanation of why Black people love horror so much:
“...horror is an excellent mechanism to visualize, confront, and try to overcome racial trauma.”
I interrupt Judgment’s counter-argument before the first word is finished with my own questions, “Don’t teenagers love to be individuals? Don’t they naturally want to be unique and question, criticize, and judge everything that exists today–especially when ‘everyone’ is all the adults that they see? Wouldn’t they jump at the idea to share their ideas because of their belief that they know it all and have it all figured out? Wouldn’t they be relieved to be able to play with the puzzle of the future instead of exclusively being asked to solve it?”
Before Judgment can respond, I hit him with the kill shot, “And, don’t kids love scary movies? I went through a helluva horror movie phase, and this is a renaissance. Wouldn’t kids want to be the experts on how to avoid zombies, kill vampires, and slay demons? Wouldn’t they want to show off all of their brilliance in crafting stories that celebrate all the ways that they continue to survive?” Judgment dismissed.
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