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American Fantastic challenges readers to recognize an organizing myth in America’s perception of its imperialist past, “the myth of redemptive violence.” Derek J. Thiess persuasively argues that this myth serves to obscure the deep thread of Christian supremacy that underwrites America’s colonial and imperial impulses, from the early colonial period to westward expansion to the contemporary global order. This American imaginary, which enmeshes religion with violence, is constructed in multiple contentious and productive contact zones: between genres, between cultures, and between past and present.

Thiess’s interdisciplinary study examines America’s past and present imperial projects, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Eastern Seaboard, as they proliferate in popular story forms. By interrogating American myths, legends, and fantastic narratives across an impressive array of genres, including folk narratives, science fiction, movies, and more, Thiess exposes how the “myth of redemptive violence” manifests in contemporary constructions of America’s fantastic imaginaries.

Asian American writers have long produced literary works of speculative fiction, the supergenre that employs science fictional, fantastical, or supernatural elements. Stephen Hong Sohn’s Asian Ameritopias is the first book-length study to consider how these aesthetically complex and wildly imaginative representations offer writers a way to explore themes of race and identity, as well as alternate futures and other planets.

Sohn examines how various novels and stories enable Asian American writers to engage with and reimagine issues of social justice, revisualize the bounds of social collectives, and create new pathways for precarious subjects. Asian Ameritopias assesses speculative fictions that spotlight supernatural horror and fantasy, such as ghosts and magical objects, to excavate racialized histories of oppression. Moving to science fiction, Sohn shows how Asian American cyborgs employ their technological powers to offer protection for socially marginalized groups, including sex workers, the undocumented, the poor, and the injured. He ends by analyzing three novels featuring extraterrestrials who look like Asian Americans in order to address issues of xenophobia and ostracization.

The speculative fictions Sohn unpacks in Asian Ameritopias provide a ripe opportunity to reflect on and confront our current, turbulent reality.

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES

A philosophical and formally inventive inquiry into the experimental terrains of American speculative fiction, where meaning emerges through ambiguity, rupture, and critical refusal.

Dear Incomprehension: On American Speculative Fiction is a thought-provoking exploration of the fascinating field of contemporary speculative fiction, a genre that transcends boundaries and encompasses science fiction, fabulist tales, modern fairy tales, and experimental narratives that challenge the very essence of storytelling and reading.

Written as a philosophical essay that mirrors the unorthodox nature of the texts it analyzes, Dear Incomprehension examines American works that defy traditional narrative devices such as plot, character, logic, and even legibility. Drawing on a number of philosophical theories, among them object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, Vanderhaeghe argues that these unconventional works resist the standard tools of criticism, demanding instead a novel perspective and approach.

An in-depth resource for scholars and students of contemporary literature, philosophy, and digital literary studies, Dear Incomprehension offers a fresh framework for analyzing experimental fiction and alternative modes of meaning-making. It is a must-read for those seeking to grasp the complexities and nuances of American experimental and speculative fiction.

In Doom Patterns, Maia Gil’Adí takes up speculative fiction as a site for theorizing Latinx identity across national and ethnic borders and shows the vital role of historical trauma in its formation. Her analysis moves beyond reparative modes of reading to consider how literary representations of violence, destruction, and pain also elicit pleasurable affective and aesthetic experiences. Gil’Adí theorizes the paradox of pleasurable violence through the notion of doom patterns—narrative devices that include thematic repetition, nonlinear narration, character fragmentation, and unresolved plots. Doom patterns return the reader to instances of historical violence and destruction, revealing them as excessive and otherworldly processes that require the tropes of speculative fiction. Examining novels by established Latinx authors such as Junot Díaz and Cristina García as well as multiethnic writers such as Colson Whitehead and Sesshu Foster, Gil’Adí challenges definitions of what constitutes Latinx literature and notions of the speculative by dismantling generic boundaries and entrenched definitions of race, ethnicity, and nationhood. In so doing, she allows for a more capacious consideration of the speculative, realism, history, and the role of violence in literature.

In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them. Against efforts to subsume varied forms of resistance into a single framework in the name of solidarity, Rifkin argues that Black and Indigenous political struggles are oriented in distinct ways, following their own lines of development and contestation. Rifkin suggests how movement between the two can be approached as something of a speculative leap in which the terms and dynamics of one are disoriented in the encounter with the other. Futurist fiction provides a compelling site for exploring such disjunctions. Through analyses of works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and others, the book illustrates how ideas about fungibility, fugitivity, carcerality, marronage, sovereignty, placemaking, and governance shape the ways Black and Indigenous intellectuals narrate the past, present, and future. In turning to speculative fiction, Rifkin illustrates how speculation as a process provides conceptual and ethical resources for recognizing difference while engaging across it.

“An outstanding showcase of contemporary Latinx authors exploring identity through the conventions of sci-fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Themes of family, migration, and community resonate throughout these 38 masterful stories. … This is a knockout.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Finalist, 2022 World Fantasy Awards
Finalist, 2022 Ignyte Awards
Finalist, 2022 Utopia Awards

In a tantalizing array of new works from some of the most exciting Latinx creators working in the speculative vein today, Speculative Fiction for Dreamers extends the project begun with a previous anthology, Latinx Rising (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), to showcase a new generation of writers. Spanning diverse forms, settings, perspectives, and styles, but unified by their drive to imagine new Latinx futures, these stories address the breadth of contemporary Latinx experiences and identities while exuberantly embracing the genre’s ability to entertain and surprise. With new work for new audiences in their teens and up, and especially for Latinx people navigating their identities in the ever-shifting, sometimes perilous, but always promising cultural landscape of the US, this book is for dreamers—and DREAMers—everywhere. 
 
Contributors: Grisel Y. Acosta, Stephanie Adams-Santos, Frederick Luis Aldama, William Alexander, Nicholas Belardes, Louangie Bou-Montes, Lisa M. Bradley, Eliana Buenrostro, Diana Burbano, Pedro Cabiya, Steve Castro, Fernando de Peña, Scott Russell Duncan, Samy Figaredo, Tammy Melody Gomez, J. M. Guzman, Ernest Hogan, Pedro Iniguez, Ezzy G. Languzzi, Patrick Lugo, Roxanne Ocasio, Daniel Parada, Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, Reyes Ramirez, Julia Rios, Sara Daniele Rivera, Roman Sanchez, Tabitha Sin, Alex Temblador, Rodrigo Vargas, Laura Villareal, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez