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.

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Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.