Thread by @Ebonyteach

I'm not sure if Octavia Butler was Black American or if her folks were from the Caribbean, but KINDRED is sort of Shakespeare for anyone wanting to build a Black North American fantastic world. She dealt with the problem of slavery way back in the 70s.

Plenty of challenges for building a North American Black fantastic:
1) Slavery, of course. How can you build SFF while incorporating that?
2) Also, it's not North America after all. This place is Turtle Island & belongs to 100s of Native nations -- have to take that into account.

3) What do you do about language? Naming people and places? Naming magical phenomena? Sounds cooler when it's not just plain old English.
4) What about religion? Many (not all) Black US folk are Christian & Muslim, and much of our history & folklore -- & myth -- involves faith.

5) What do you do about fantasy itself being a weird genre that's sort of colonial? Some are dissatisfied with pan-African worldbuilding. Others are skeptical of "Black versions" of White SFF. Does this tension reveal fault lines in the genre itself, illuminated by Blackness?

There are so many questions. The answers reside in the work of more than a century of Black authors who have already written Black SFF set in the United States, worldbuilding using US myth.

MBJ's comments reveal why I am sometimes impatient with colleagues who, when I reveal this problem of location in Black fantasy, say "You're thinking too much about national border. This isn't about nation. You know that culture doesn't operate that way."

It's true that neither culture nor imagination respect political borders, and that art and thought are produced by exchange. Flow.

However, when young Black Americans report they're being told they have no culture, no myths, and no language to speak of, they're not making it up.

And that's why I had to toss the entire problem of location / spacetime problem out of #TheDarkFantastic. It's divisive to note that the wave is SFF from certain parts of Africa & her Diaspora, while other locations are seen as devoid of speculative possibility -- just pain.

Anyway. Statements like MBJ's are important, and shouldn't be dismissed as "he's ignorant" or "of course we have myths and folklore, shut up." He's not the only one who feels that way, and it matters. Has import for the formation of imagination, consciousness -- and identity.