The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual by Lavelle Porter (review)

Abstract

tactics of Afrofuturism to propel Black militants toward a final, “flawless victory, a bloodless revolution” (184). Lavender poignantly centers a key aspect of Afrofuturism—what he calls “the hope impulse”—as an animating force behind all African American literature from the very first narratives of enslaved people to Black cultural productions of the present day. However, to say that African American literature is Afrofuturist because it is hopeful, as Lavender constantly does throughout the book, is somewhat reductive. Lavender’s other critical terms, such as “the transhistorical feedback loop” and “networked consciousness,” also work against his analysis at times by shoehorning the texts into predetermined conclusions rather than considering their individual nuances. However, the book’s missteps are all in the service of building up Afrofuturism not just as an aesthetic but also as an analytic in which “finding the future in the past should be a core tenet” (112). In this way, Lavender’s work complements the recent scholarship of Kara Keeling (2019), Sami Schalk (2018), and Ytasha Womack (2013) by providing their objects of analysis with an origin story deeply rooted in the world of the Americas. Although Lavender’s analysis does not always live up to his aspirations, he opens a discussion about the wider applicability of Afrofuturism as a reading practice that has its own history beyond the 1993 coinage of the word and its 1970s ur-texts. Like Sun Ra, who claimed to be “on the other side of time,” Afrofuturism Rising makes a bold claim for the Black experience as unbounded by linear time.