Abstract

Through an exploration of N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, I argue that black women’s speculative fiction is not just a literary genre, but a theoretical-intellectual endeavor. Weaving together Black feminist thought with Black women’s speculative fiction, I show how black women speculative writers, in fact, create and enact theories through their work’s foundation, granting additional insight into black intellectual work and the experiences of black women currently and historically. The Fifth Season is a particularly rich example of a theoretical literary work because it enters into conversation with a range of topics including (but by no means limited to) difference, the ways such logics are weaponized to create systemic violence, and how enslavement and the legacy of colonial wars and projects hinders the ability to maintain a wholistic sense of self and alters an individual’s conceptions of freedom and future. That is to say, it is not that we read the literature through a theoretical lens but that the literature is creating and supporting the intellectual/theoretical fields. In using a black feminist theoretical framework, including both traditionally understood theory and other speculative fiction work – like Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti and Octavia E. Butler’s “Amnesty” – to understand Jemisin’s world, I aim to not only demonstrate its theoretical nature, but also emphasize how operating within genre fiction offers the freedom to explore possible routes to our future and what that may look like.

Advisor

Garcia, Daimys

Department

English

Disciplines

Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority

Keywords

The Fifth Season, black feminism, speculative fiction

Publication Date

2024

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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