The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination by Maxine Lavon Montgomery

(Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)

Reviewed by Arike Oke

This slim volume is the latest in Professor Maxine Montgomery’s decades-long and seminal investigation into Black women’s apocalyptic writing. Here Montgomery addresses the scope of the imagined post-apocalyptic world, from the Burn that destroys Toronto in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in The Ring, to the layers of visioning forwards and backwards in Beyonce’s Lemonade.

The apocalypse is conceptually ever in front of us, but speculative and near-future apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction operates at a level of understanding that the apocalypse has already happened, multiple times. For people of the African diaspora one of the most significant real history apocalyptic events was the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. For many of the adults and children trafficked in this trade, history stopped. Society stopped. Family stopped. Language stopped, and the world was made anew for them in a hellscape of abuse, dislocation and enslavement. Just as in the mainstream, white-cultured, fictional visions of a post-apocalyptic world elements of the culture pre-Fall persist (see A Canticle for Leibowitz, Planet of the Apes’ denouement, the longing towards the half-forgotten in the Mad Max series), so too the Black female post-apocalyptic vision features a yearning towards the pre-apocalypse society from which the post Slave Trade African diaspora were forced onto a new stony future.

The psychosis of the enslaved Africans’ apocalypse is one in which the before-times carried on without them—meaning that their descendants can return to their ancestral lands and find them strange. This lived layer of disturbance to the path of history opens up divergences and richness’s of the creative resources to writers of this diaspora who focus on apocalyptic, near-apocalypse and post-apocalypse fiction, as the ones featured and examined in Montgomery’s book. Beyond that Montgomery’s discourse introduces investigative overlays of gender (female identifying, especially including matrilineal transmission of culture) and sexuality.

Montgomery is writing an academic investigation through this book, not a treatise, and as such she contextualises with other academics’ and writers’ work—for example giving credit to the term ‘cultural haunting’ to describe “contemporary ethnic narratives of ghostly intrusions”, to Kathleen Brogan. The book therefore becomes a guide, signpost or perhaps an invitation to delve more deeply into the discourse by providing the scholarly context around the ideas in the book.

Introducing the futurist fiction of Black women as essentially rooted through this haunting of culture past or of culture out of reach allows Montgomery to showcase and examine the writings of the Black female SF/speculative canon as responses to colonialism and racial separatism. Noting the transformations available in these genres, Montgomery is able to identify Octavia E. Butler’s vampire, and Edwidge Danticant’s sea spirit as ways in which the Black female body can be transmuted beyond time and race while still maintaining its umbilical connection to ancestral cultural heritage. Transformations are also routes in fiction to challenge notions of fixed gender and sexuality, but these are again informed by the ghost ship of colonialism and the transatlantic apocalypse. Afro-futurist writing is described as part of the continuum that understands the past existing jowl to cheek with the future. It becomes a recovering exercise not only for the lost threads and, as Montgomery describes it, the “largely unscripted heritage”, but also for the Black identities that could come about from our ruptured present. If in the present moment Black female identities are “subsumed within a master narrative of whiteness”, these writers can imagine what brave new world contains identities made whole, and visible.

This includes queer identities. Montgomery uses Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and No Telephone To Heaven novels as a way to understand the liminal space of a “creolized identity” in which it is possible to resist both Imperial/colonial influences alongside a self-constructing queer New World. The Transatlantic apocalypse as the real world apocalypse underneath the layers of diasporic Afro Futurism includes the use of zombie and zombification to symbolise the induced forgetting and severance from the past. Zombies as a cultural phenomenon are from diasporic African culture and are used in the white Western cultural canon as stand ins for modern fears (consumerism, climate change, the AIDS pandemic). In the post-apocalyptic Afro futurist female canon, Montgomery describes how the zombie exists in an induced state of not-life and not-death. This is the colonised, and enslaved, experience. Montgomery uses Erna Brodber’s Myal and Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café to argue for an “un-zombification” of Blackness. The self-construction available in futurist narratives allows for a self-led reframing of the zombie trope, in which the de-zombifying process could mean successful decolonising of the Black body and mind.

Montgomery brings her analysis full circle by the end of the book by analysing the Black female imagination for post-apocalyptic utopias. She rejects the ‘clean sheet and start again’ post-apocalyptic utopia by noting that the approach of the post-apocalyptic Black female imagination instead leans towards a salvage and build anew aesthetic. In this she is referencing fictions that draw on deluge apocalypses—in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example. In building new worlds Montgomery notes the dangers of rebuilding toxic structures from the world swept away. She cautions that Beyonce’s vision in Lemonade suggests a new world order of female violence that only replaces the patriarchal violence rather than creating something more equitable.

The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination gives us a deep dive into the textures, the limitations and the bright threads of innovation available to the post-colonial female Black diaspora writers in this space. It is rife with spoilers as Montgomery uses all of her expertise to interrogate texts, so while the book can act as a way to understand and to build out a reading list, be prepared to have all plot points not only given away but dissected. The book is slim physically but weighty in academic terms—not for a casual reader. It does however add to an emerging discussion that finally fleshes out Black women’s contribution to our collective imagining of the future, in a way that links us all back to our pasts.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.