Black Utopia and Body Agency in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts

Calvo Pascual, Mónica Carolina (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: After situating Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) as a black utopia following Zamalin’s definition of the genre, this essay will explore the text from the intra-acting lenses of black antihumanism, critical posthumanism, and queer kinship. I contend that Solomon’s novel surpasses the notions of Afrofuturism and (white) critical posthumanism alike through its portrayal of the main characters’ gender and sexual non-conformity and the radical kinship bonds they develop among themselves and with the nonhuman in the protagonist’s case. Furthermore, by the characters’ willful control and agency over their own bodies and the future possibilities envisioned in its open ending, Solomon’s ‘autistext’ subverts and explodes the Western, Enlightenment, colonial construction of white (civilized) subjecthood as opposed to the animalization of the black body and the universalist, exceptionalist logic of state-sanctioned brutality inflicted on African Americans since the Antebellum times.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.12795/REN.2025.i29.6

Año: 2025

Publicado en: Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 29 (2025), 7-25
ISSN: 1133-309X

Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA/H03-23R
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN/PID2022-137627NB-I00

Tipo y forma: Artículo (Versión definitiva)

Área (Departamento): Área Filología Inglesa (Dpto. Filolog.Inglesa y Alema.)