Tuesday, December 27, 2016

2016 notable books: Alondra Nelson's The Social Life of DNA and André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness




I haven't really done a full-fledged "best books of 2016" list this year, but if I did, I'm sure I would've mentioned Alondra Nelson's The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome and André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction.

Both books gave me all kinds of "past-future visions," to apply a term used by Nelson back in the earlier Afrofuturism  days. I was prompted to think about past occurrences with technology and science fiction communities and then again consider new developments in those fields based on the books.  

Entries on Carrington's book:
• A Notebook on André M. Carrington's Speculative Blackness  
• André M. Carrington, Mark Anthony Neal, and recovery work 
• Speculative Blackness by André M. Carrington 
• From Afrofuturism to Speculative Blackness
Entries on Nelson's book:
• Alondra Nelson and Root-Seekers
• Poet Marilyn Nelson and scholar Alondra Nelson on Venture Smith  
• Afrofuturists, Black Panthers & Genealogists: Alondra Nelson's Multi-threaded Journeys

Related:
• Books noted lists
• The year in African American poetry, 2016
• A visual recap of poetry blog entries in 2016
• An Afrofuturism-based timeline, 1998 - 2016 

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