"Tapestries of Time" and Afrofuturist Horizons in William Demby's King Comus

Abstract:William Demby's achievements as an innovator of Black experimental fiction are on full display in his final, posthumously published novel, King Comus, and warrant critical attention for their relevance to the temporal turn in Black studies and to the burgeoning transnational aesthetics of Afrofuturism. Demby's fiction both invites and refuses biographical readings; in King Comus, he playfully showcases the tension between the autobiographical and the fictional. Alongside the intimate and embodied, the novel brings together Demby's sustained interests in historical patterns and imbricated temporalities—from antiquity to the turn of the twenty-first century—which commingle without cohering in their ecstatic dynamism.