ABSTRACT

Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism edited by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler offers innovative approaches to teaching Black speculative fiction (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror) in ways that will inspire middle and high school students to think, talk, and write about issues of equity, justice, and antiracism. The book highlights texts by seminal authors such as Octavia E. Butler and influential and emerging authors, including Nnedi Okorafor, Kacen Callender, B. B. Alston, Tomi Adeyemi, and Bethany C. Morrow.

Each chapter in Teaching Black Speculative Fiction:

  • introduces a Black speculative text and its author,
  • describes how the text engages with issues of equity, justice, and/or antiracism,
  • explains and describes how one theory or approach helps elucidate the key text’s concern with equity, justice, and/or antiracism, and
  • offers engaging teaching activities that encourage students to read the focal text; that facilitate exploration of the text and a theoretical lens or critical approach; and that guide students to consider ways to extend the focus on equity, justice, and/or antiracism to action in their own lives and communities.

chapter 2|10 pages

The Responsibility to Remember

India Hill Brown's The Forgotten Girl

chapter 4|11 pages

Illusions of Identity

Counternarratives in B. B. Alston's Amari and the Night Brothers

chapter 5|10 pages

The Power of Voice and Choice

Examining Blackness, Black Girlhood, and Identity in A Song Below Water

chapter 6|10 pages

Creative Disruptions

Protest Art and Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Summer Prince

chapter 11|9 pages

Race in the Zombie Apocalypse

Teaching Justina Ireland's Dread Nation

chapter 12|10 pages

Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon

Classroom Projects from an Animal Rights Perspective

chapter 13|11 pages

“Slavery Was a Long Slow Process of Dulling”

Octavia Butler's Kindred as a Medium for Teaching Empathy, Social Justice, and Antiracism

chapter 14|11 pages

Slavery Was a Choice?

Lessons from Kindred by Octavia Butler

chapter 15|9 pages

“I Serve the Spirits and I Heal the Living”

Communities of Care as Sites of Resistance in Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring

chapter |3 pages

Resources