This week’s edition of Slow Digest is written by C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee N. Pritchard.
Monique, a 16-year-old Black girl, sits in her classroom, headphones on and book in hand. She tries to block out the noise of the classmates around her as she transports herself to 1880s Baltimore in an alternative history, where a Black girl her same age, Jane, is forced to fight the undead to protect a world that refuses to see her humanity. Monique loses herself in the story, following Jane on the pages and in the words of the audiobook coming from the headphones. She admires Jane’s strength, power, and fearlessness as she fights to survive.
The book is called Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, a young adult novel that is set in the aftermath of the Civil War. The dead rise from the battlefields of Gettysburg and begin attacking the living. Black and indigenous children are tasked with killing zombies and protecting white citizens.
“I want to read a book about us, sometimes,” Monique tells me. “I want to be recognized because, a lot of the time, we don’t get recognized because of our color… I just want to see Black women, like, being powerful.”
She explains that when she reads, she can feel what the characters in the book feel, almost as if she, herself, is the protagonist. This form of connection between reader and story, especially one that centers a Black girl surviving and resisting a world that seeks to silence and control her, is itself an act of recognition. Through reading, Monique is discovering evidence of herself and her possibilities, even if that evidence exists in an imagined past.
What does it mean to build a speculative archive, to remember and imagine a past, present, and future from the perspective of the subject herself? What possibilities open up when we think about Black girlhood through the lens of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, where Black women, as writers, and Black girls, as readers, can shape their own histories? These questions drive my research, which explores how Black women’s speculative fiction functions as an alternative archive of Black girlhood.
Alternative archives are spaces constructed outside of institutional archives that document histories, stories, and testimonies that are often overlooked and forgotten in official archival channels. They have the power to prioritize histories, memories, and experiences of marginalized communities and are inclusive of various ways of knowing.
In their study of Black South African women’s voices in the archival process, Ria van der Merwe examines the inclusion of story cloths that involve the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible the history of their particular group on their own terms.[1] Jeannette A. Bastian examines Carnival, an annual tradition in many Caribbean islands, as a cultural archive that produces non-traditional records that transmit genealogies, folkways, food customs, and history.[2] Ann Cvetkovich argues for an archive of feelings that allow women to work through their sexual trauma by documenting public cultures that are inclusive of activism, performance, and literature.[3] Together, these examples remind us that archives are not confined to buildings or boxes but live through people, practices, and art.
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez takes this even further, showing how memory itself can be embodied and performed. In his essay “A Living Archive of Desire,” Roque Ramírez examines queer Latino community archives as living, breathing records of desire and survival. He writes about Teresita la Campesina, a transgender Latina performer and activist in San Francisco’s Mission District, showing how memory lives in the body, in performance, and in the act of telling one’s story out loud – a testimonio.[4] The archive, in this sense, is a person, a song, a moment of connection.
From these archival studies, I explore the fluidity of the archive and memory-making in relation to speculative fiction and Black girls’ engagement with the genre. Speculative fiction is a genre of world building, social commentary, and allegory. It is a genre where writers can reimagine the world through narratives that range from cautionary tales about the impact of technology on society to the mythologies of vampires to first contact with an alien species and visionary images of the future.
Black women’s speculative storytelling acknowledges Black girls within their own social, political, and cultural contexts, and most importantly, it allows them the opportunity for hopescapes, narratives that analyze the historic past and the troubled present to determine the possibilities of Black futures.[5]
I think of the speculative archive in the same manner as Sadiya Hartman, Marissa Fuentes, Tiya Miles, Christina Sharpe, and other scholars who utilize alternative historical methods to interpret fuller lives for Black people in the Diaspora. Fuentes reads against the bias grain of the archive, questioning the positionality of traditional archives and their construction of historical narratives and identities within colonial power structures.[6] Hartman[7] and Miles[8] use critical fabulation to reconstruct the lives and legacies of Black women and girls using a combination of archival materials and close narration to tell women’s stories from “inside the circle,” the point of view of historical subjects rather than the point of view of those enslaving or victimizing them. Sharpe, through wake work, makes Black life visible using a method of annotation and redaction in popular media and literature that she she calls a way of “imagining otherwise.”[9]
In my method, I lean on radical imagination, centering Black girls’ agency, subjectivity, and ways of knowing to understand how engaging with science fiction, fantasy, and horror becomes a form of world-building and a speculative archive of their own making. The genre, as written by Black women, has the ability to restore Black humanity and survival through storytelling, and my interviews with Black girl readers show how vast their imaginations truly are. They envision themselves inside the story, even when the characters don’t look like them. They’re empathetic readers, drawn to character-driven, layered narratives where they can lose themselves and, in the process, find themselves too. Speculative fiction as an alternative archive reorders the power of the archive itself. It values imagination as knowledge, positioning Black girls not just as subjects to be remembered but as creators of memory, culture, and history.
And maybe that’s the real work of the speculative archive, to let girls like Monique see themselves not only surviving, but shaping the world, on the page and beyond it.
Recommendations for Further Exploration
Story Cart: Attention with Symphony Swan – Memory Activation, a memory and archival workshop with one of C21’s Story Fellows. Participants will tap into memory, unearthing and documenting personal and collective stories as a way of building archives that reflect the full spectrum of the Black experience, particularly in Milwaukee. The event is on November 8 from 1-3 pm at the CR8TV House in Old North Milwaukee. Registration is required.
Fact, Fiction, and Storytelling in the Archive, a visually led talk by visiting author and artist Faythe Levine who reimagines archives and collections through a queer feminist lens. The talk explores her many-year research process about her recently published fourth book, As Ever, Miriam (2024). The event is on November 18 from 3-4 pm in the American Geographical Society Library in Golda Meir Library, 2311 E. Hartford Ave. Milwaukee, WI.
[1] van der Merwe, Ria. “From a Silent Past to a Spoken Future. Black Women’s Voices in the Archival Process.” Archives and Records (Abingdon, England) 40, no. 3 (2019): 239–58. doi:10.1080/23257962.2017.1388224.
[2] Bastian, Jeannette A. “‘Play Mas’: Carnival in the Archives and the Archives in Carnival: Records and Community Identity in the US Virgin Islands.” Archival Science 9, no. 1–2 (2009): 113–25. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9101-6.
[3] Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings : Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
[4] Roque Ramírez, Horacio N. “A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita La Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories.” In Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette Burton, 111-135. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005.
[5] Toliver, S.R. “Imagining New Hopescapes: Expanding Black Girls’ Windows and Mirrors.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature 1, no. 1 (2018). doi:10.21900/j.rydl.v1i1.1511.
[6] Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. 1st ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc, 2016. doi:10.9783/9780812293005.
[7] Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2020.
[8] Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried : The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. New York: Random House, 2021.
[9] Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake : On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.