Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monae. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term "posthuman blackness" to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory - an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality - in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Morrison's Beloved. Reading neo-slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.

Globalization and transnationalism have reshaped our communities and their borderlines. Communities exceed fixed boundaries, existing instead in the liminal spaces where narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate. These liminal spaces-physical and virtual, local and global-provide opportunities for diversifying discussions on diaspora, cultural hybridity, and ethnic identity. Ethnic women writers make significant contributions to this dialogue regarding the reconfiguration of people and their perimeters. A multigenre and multicultural text, Community Boundaries and Border Crossings explores the novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies, testimonios, plays, poems, and hybrid poetics of established and emerging ethnic women writers. This collection of critical essays highlights the new zones of cultural contact and exchange that are defining the twenty-first century. Each chapter reflects an awareness of cultural changes and challenges, engaging readers in a richly productive conversation concerning the interconnectedness of border crossings and community boundaries.

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monae. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term "posthuman blackness" to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory-an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality-in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Morrison's Beloved. Reading neo-slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.