Abstract
This study analyzes how contemporary African American literature reimagines community through the convergence of oceanic memory, Black spirituality, and speculative worldmaking. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s Love, Rivers Solomon’s “The Deep,” and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I argue that these works engage ancient Kemetic philosophy and West African cosmologies to create decolonizing narratives of collective healing and transformation. These texts demonstrate what Christina Sharpe terms “wake work”—the ongoing navigation of slavery’s afterlife—while engaging in what Kodwo Eshun identifies as chronopolitical intervention, constructing counter-futures that challenge linear historical narratives. By analyzing oceanic spaces as sites of trauma and renewal, this study reveals how Black authors deploy water imagery and fragmented temporalities to access what Michelle Wright calls the “physics of blackness,” where identity exists across multiple dimensions. Central to this analysis is the concept of Ma’at—the Kemetic principle of balance, justice, and cosmic order—which functions as an organizing framework for understanding how these novels approach community restoration. Morrison’s coastal resort community, Solomon’s underwater civilization of the Wajinru, and Butler’s Earthseed commune each model alternative social formations grounded in spiritual principles that refuse Western binaries between material and immaterial, individual and collective, past and future. This study contributes to conversations about how the humanities enable us to imagine beyond current geographical, temporal, and epistemological borders by recovering suppressed knowledge systems and creating new possibilities for communal flourishing in the face of ongoing dispossession.
Presenters
Ikea JohnsonAssistant Professor, English, Communications and Media, Salve Regina University, Rhode Island, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Speculative worldmaking, Kemetic philosophy, Oceanic memory, West African cosmology
