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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