Episode 176: Transcript

Episode: 176: The Power of Protest (with andré carrington)

Transcription by Alexander

Annalee:                    [00:00:00] So Charlie Jane, what was the first protest you ever attended?

Charlie Jane:             [00:00:04] You know, you told me you were going to ask me that and I've been thinking about it and I just... it's weird because I don't know what's considered a protest and what's considered like something else. Like when I was in college I was heavily involved in homelessness activism and we definitely did some events to like raise awareness about homelessness and we did kind of some, you know, some actions I would say. They weren't like a march though.

                                    [00:00:28] And like, you know, similarly when I first joined the queer community I was doing like, I went to the Pride Parade, I did other sort of queer events. Were those protests? I don't know. I feel like probably the first official official protest I did was like maybe against the Iraq War. Like I took part in some actual marches against the Iraq War. That might have been the first for me, which feels weird but like there are things that were sort of liminally protests before that.

Annalee:                    [00:00:54] Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking about the same thing because, for example, the Pride Parade did start as a protest.

Charlie Jane:             [00:01:01] I know.

Annalee:                    [00:01:01] And, you know, over time it just became a celebration. And so yesterday's protest is, you know, sometimes just today's party, which I love.

                                    [00:01:11] I think my first protest was in college. I went to UC Berkeley and in the late 80s I was involved with a group called Students Against Intervention in Central America or SAICA. And we were protesting military intervention in Nicaragua, which feels very relevant again today. And it's funny because I don't remember much about that protest because it was a long time ago. But what I do remember is that I really liked learning all the lingo of the leftists who were protesting.

                                    [00:01:46] Like they wouldn't call it a demonstration. They'd say like it's a demo. “We're going to a demo.” And I was like, oh, I'm finally part of real leftist culture because I know that they say demo.

                                    [00:01:58] But I do have a really vivid memory. of another protest that I did right around that same time at Berkeley for a feminist group. And we just went into the middle of Sproul Plaza, which was the big kind of central plaza on campus, and set up a microphone and kind of yelled about feminism and then had a sledgehammer. And we just used it to smash a bunch of scales and like boxes of diet powder. And it was so incredible and galvanizing.

                                    [00:02:30] Like to this day, I remember what it felt like to have that sledgehammer in my hand and smash a scale. So I think that's maybe my first genuine memory of a protest is just smashing, smashing patriarchy.

Charlie Jane:             [00:02:44] Yeah, it's so funny. I mean, I've enjoyed being part of a lot of like activist movements in the past. I don't really…  I'm not an activist leader, but I'm happy to be like a foot soldier or whatever.

Annalee:                    [00:02:55] Yeah, me too.

Charlie Jane:             [00:02:56] I'm happy to like be a warm body for your activist movement. You know, I've enjoyed taking part in actions and kind of things that were on the edge of like pranks and protests and stuff. But until pretty recently, I thought of protesting mostly as just like a thing that you did that was like your duty. Like it's like, okay, we're all going to go to the women's march and it's our duty to show up like, or like, you know, we have to show up and be counted.

                                    [00:03:21] And it's really only this year in the last like few months, like taking part in some of the Tesla showroom protests and taking part in some of the queer protests that happened that I felt like, okay, this is actually where I'm drawing inspiration and you know, energy from like this is actually making me feel engaged and like activated in a way that I wouldn't otherwise feel.

                                    [00:03:43] And it feels like partly because all other avenues have been closed off and partly because there's just so much amazing energy behind protesting right now. And it's just people are so pumped to get out there and protest that it just feels really like gorgeous and exciting and just like liberating. And it's one of the things I'm enjoying most right now.

Annalee:                    [00:04:03] Yeah. And today we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the power of protest in real life, but also in fiction. And in fact, the act of writing science fiction can itself be a protest. And sometimes it's just as powerful as marching in the street, if not more.

                                    [00:04:19] And later in the episode, we will be talking about the power of words with andré carrington, who is an academic and the editor of an incredible new anthology of black speculative fiction called The Black Fantastic.

                                    [00:04:34] You are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that protests everything and ends the day by eating a big bag of cookies. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction. I have a novella coming out later this year called Automatic Noodle, which is in fact, a little bit about protests. So check it out.

Charlie Jane:             [00:04:57] My God, I love Automatic Noodle. I was wearing my Automatic Noodle t-shirt with pride yesterday. It's so great. It's such a wonderful book. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I am a science fiction writer, a fantasy writer, and I have a new book coming out in August called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young trans woman who is a PhD student, but also a witch. And she's teaching her mother how to do magic.

Annalee:                    [00:05:25] And it's so good. I want to learn to do the kind of magic that she does because it is… Once you read it, listeners, you will be like, yes, this is the magic for me.

                                    [00:05:34] Also, on our mini episode next week, we will be talking about why everyone is suddenly obsessed with plants, which is something I feel very deeply. All right, let's start the show.

[00:05:47] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Annalee:                    [00:06:17] So, Charlie Jane, we've been going to a lot of protests and there's an argument to be made that we shouldn't talk about going to protests because our government is detaining people for dissenting. But, if we don't talk about it, who's going to know what's happening?

Charlie Jane:             [00:06:33] Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm of the mind that the more people tell us not to do something, the more I want to do it, the more, like, especially the respectable, serious people who are the centrist pundits, the people who, you know, know what's proper and right are saying, “oh, do not do that. That is a waste.” If they say it's a waste of time, they clearly don't think it's a waste of time. And, you know, the fact that we're being threatened with like outsized repercussions for exercising our constitutional right to protest makes me feel like they're scared. They're scared of us doing this. They know that we have power. They know that the more we do it, the more people will want to join us. And it's infectious.

                                    [00:07:14] When I'm out there protesting at a Tesla showroom, people are honking their horns as they drive by. Bus drivers are super excited. Just everybody seems to be like, yes, this is just so exciting and so awesome. And it just feels like a movement.

Annalee:                    [00:07:29] Yeah.

Charlie Jane:             [00:07:29] So, I can see why they're scared and want us to stop.

Annalee:                    [00:07:32] Yeah. One of the things that's been really interesting at all of the protests that I've been going to recently, a lot of them are at the Tesla showroom here in San Francisco, is that the protests are big umbrellas for people who are coming together from many different communities and with many different political issues that overlap.

                                    [00:07:52] So you'll see people who are anti-capitalist. You'll see people who are just anti-Elon Musk, but then you'll also see people with signs that are pro-science and signs that say “bring back all the federal workers” and signs that are pro-trans. And there's this big group of us who may not have realized that we were allies, but now we're coming together and we've found common ground. And that common ground is we want to get rid of this current regime in the White House that is incredibly violent and oppressive.

                                    [00:08:27] And I've been thinking a lot about how important protests are, but even more how important it is to keep a record of them somehow, whether in writing or some other medium. And yet, as I said earlier, it feels dangerous. I keep thinking about how in Hungary the government has banned queer pride events and they're now going to be using drones to do facial recognition of people who are in pride marches in Hungary so that they can automatically be fined. Kind of like those license plate recognition cameras that we see in the States sometimes that automatically fine you for running a red light or speeding.

                                    [00:09:09] It really feels like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel where we've edged over into absurdist surveillance. And it's hard to know how to respond. It's hard to know whether to keep protesting or protect yourself or when to do one and when to do the other.

Charlie Jane:             [00:09:28] Yeah, it feels incredibly dystopian and dark cyberpunk. It feels like all those horrific visions of the surveillance dystopia that we grew up on are now coming to pass. And it is genuinely kind of terrifying. Think about how much risk you are taking to your own personal freedom and survival by going out there and protesting. How much you're willing to risk. I think about that a lot in many contexts lately because life is increasingly a matter of risk management in many ways.

                                    [00:10:03] But, you know, we still have power in just like our bodies and our presence and our voices being in one place and speaking out. And I feel like, as I said before, that they're scared of it. So they're trying to discourage us and trying to like make it feel like we're going to be in huge trouble if we do this. But they can't stop us. They, you know, there's too many of us. We're too loud. We're too correct for them to stop us.

Annalee:                    [00:10:31] We're also just too fricking messy, you know, because we're doing a bunch of different shit. And this is what makes me think about science fiction representations of protest because there are so many models and it's not just science fiction. It's also fantasy. It's also horror. It's speculative fiction overall, where we see writers, creatives thinking about what protest can look like.

                                    [00:10:58] I think a lot about in the nonfiction realm, L.A. Kaufman's book, How to Read a Protest, because she's led a ton of protests. She's a big organizer and she thinks of protests as a form of performance art. Like she organized the die in at the Sackler Museum because of the fact that the Sacklers had been basically underwriting the opioid epidemic. And so a bunch of people went to the museum and just lay down and pretended to be dead. And it was art. It was not just people chanting. It was showing people who were at the museum like this is the end result of the people who have, you know, given money to this museum. They're also giving money to just kill poor people in the United States.

                                    [00:11:42] So I think there's so many ways that we can look to art and to fiction to give us ideas about how to do protests. And so I was thinking a little bit about andréa Hairston's newest novel, Archangels of Funk, where the whole kind of thrust of the novel – it's a big sprawling novel and it's kind of a post-apocalypse, but it's set in a free town of people in the states or what used to be the states. And they're putting on a play and it's kind of an improvisational play. It's clearly, andréa has said, it's influenced by Sun Ra's performances and it's going to be dance and drama and music and robots are involved and like uplifted dogs and like all kinds of humans and non-human animals. So it's very joyous.

                                    [00:12:37] And they're, of course, they're beset on all sides by people who are trying to harm them and who are trying to, you know, get various things out of the community. But they're still putting on the show and the show embodies the spirit of like pleasure and joy in the face of oppression. And that's one great model of protest.

                                    [00:12:57] But then there's stuff like Mr. Robot. Which was a hugely popular show, which is the other end, right? It's protest as annihilation. It's like, how do we literally blow up the system and kill people? We don't care if we kill them. You know, and then there's all kinds of stuff in between.

Charlie Jane:             [00:13:16] Yeah. One thing that when we were talking about this episode in advance, I said earlier that I don't know where the line is between like doing like an event or an action in a protest or a party at a protest. But also you see this a lot in science fiction where like, is it a protest? Is it an uprising? You know, I feel like because science fiction, especially media science fiction, wants things to be more dramatic and more kind of exciting in a way. Often, protests will turn into uprisings or will turn into, you know, actually violent actions against the state or whatever. And so it's hard to think of things that stay peaceful or stay like purely protest in science fiction, I think.

                                    [00:13:59] You know, recently we had the thing where like everybody was kind of pointing out that in Star Trek, the Bell Riots were supposed to have happened in 2024. There was like a date when Deep Space Nine told us that the Bell Riots were going to happen and people were pointing out all of the parallels between, you know, the real life scenarios that we're having right now of like unhoused people being just crushed and, you know, displaced and treated like literal garbage. And, you know, the ways in which the state is coming down and marginalize people harder and harder in general. And like the conditions that led to the Bell Riots in Deep Space Nine.

                                    [00:14:37] And people were like, “okay, it's going to happen. It's time for the Bell Riots.” And of course, they didn't happen because that's fiction. But everybody on the internet got really excited that maybe it was all going to come true. I mean, you know.

Annalee:                    [00:14:48] Yeah. And maybe it will. And maybe we can not call them riots. Maybe we can call it an uprising instead.

Charlie Jane:             [00:14:55] Or a protest movement.

Annalee:                    [00:14:57] A protest movement. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because the language we use matters so much. And, you know, you'll see media coverage of what is clearly a protest. And this happened a lot during Black Lives Matter, where a protest would be described as a riot.

Charlie Jane:             [00:15:12] Oh, yeah.

Annalee:                    [00:15:13] And of course, riot brings to mind something violent and disorganized and destructive that has no meaning. It has no intent behind it other than destruction.

Charlie Jane:             [00:15:23] It's just pure wanton violence.

Annalee:                    [00:15:25] Right. And so it drains away the political meaning of any event. I personally try to avoid describing political protests or movements as riots. There are things that are riots. And they are not generally political. Or they may have sort of elements of politics. But it's not the same idea.

Charlie Jane:             [00:15:45] Like you said before, it's messy. Like we're messy, but also this is messy because you could have an event that is a protest, but that shades over into violence on the edges. You could have an event that is, you know, a rally that turns into a protest, that turns into…

Annalee:                    [00:16:03] A riot. Yeah.

Charlie Jane:             [00:16:04] I mean, the thing about quote unquote riots is that, you know, you might have a few people who are being violent on the margins. And does that make the whole thing a riot? You also can have times like I remember talking to someone back in the day who took part in a protest that became extremely violent. Like the whole crowd turned angry and started smashing things. And he felt swept up in it. He felt like he was carried away.

                                    [00:16:27] Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like I was thinking about the movie, Sorry to Bother You, the Boots Riley film, where there is that, the whole thing where Steven Yeun is leading a protest and it's a nice kind of peaceful protest. And it becomes a litmus test in a way.

                                    [00:16:42] Basically, like Cassius Green, I think, is the name of the main character. The way you know that he's selling out is that he won't take part in Steven Yeun's protest.

Annalee:                    [00:16:52] Yeah, that's super interesting. I feel like Boots Riley pretty much always has a protest or uprising in his stories, which is one of the many things I love about him. But in I'm a Virgo, his television series that he did for Amazon, they also have a series of protests. They're related to housing. And like many protests in his work, there are mutants in the protest and there are people who are being physically transformed in fantastical ways who are protesting what's being done to their bodies.

                                    [00:17:24] And I love that combination of kind of magical realism with the experience of a very real protest on the street, because I think there is something magical that happens in a protest where we feel kind of the boundaries between our bodies dissolving a little bit. And we kind of merge into the body politic in a utopian way.

                                    [00:17:47] But of course, that can go bad. Like you said, it can turn into violence, particularly when there's some sort of repressive state apparatus hovering, waiting to launch tear gas or shoot into the crowd with rubber bullets.

Charlie Jane:             [00:18:00] Right. Yeah. And you know, I feel like part of what I love about protests is that they are democracy. And like we think of democracy as voting. We think of democracy as civic institutions, but it's not. Democracy is the people participating in politics. And that's what a protest is in its purest form.

Annalee:                    [00:18:19] Yeah. You know, that is what direct action is when you can no longer just change things by voting and you actually have to directly address power on the street instead of in the voting booth. I mean, that's built into democracy that we have that lever. Like, you know, if the institutions are not working, we still have the people.

                                    [00:18:41] It's funny because we've been talking about kind of representations of protest in science fiction. Sometimes protest in science fiction is just like something that you see off on the side, like something big is happening. And then it'll like cut to, you know, some kind of monitor or video screen. And you can see like it'll be like “outside, hundreds of people are protesting” or “millions of people across the galaxy are protesting.”

                                    [00:19:06] And it's kind of just this amplification tool. Like they aren't really dealing with the protest itself. They're just sort of using it as shorthand for like people are upset. But I think by and large, you know, science fiction, speculative fiction do take the idea of protest pretty seriously. And I think that's because there's a way in which creating speculative fiction is a protest. In the same way that, you know, we talk about protest music. I think that science fiction is kind of a protest genre in some ways.

Charlie Jane:             [00:19:39] I mean, I think any time you're presenting an alternative version of the future or of history, like, you know, an alternative vision of our society, past, present or future, you are engaging in an act of protest in a way. And you are inviting readers or audience members to be in your protest with you and to join you on the on the front lines of creating this vision together. Because, you know, when you consume a story, you're helping to create the story as you're consuming it. And so yeah, I think that's 100% true.

Annalee:                    [00:20:13] Wow, that is I love the way you put that. That's so interesting. I mean, when it's a person writing the story, as opposed to say, an LLM or chatbot, you are in dialogue, you know, with an actual human being who is sharing ideas with you and sharing an alternate vision with you. That is so cool.

                                    [00:20:33] So what do you think of when you think of protest science fiction? Does anything come to mind as an example? Like, you know, we think of certain types of music as protest music. What's the protest science fiction subgenre look like?

Charlie Jane:             [00:20:49] I mean, to me, especially these days, it is science fiction that centers marginalized people or is especially created by marginalized people that kind of imagines a world where we all have personhood and dignity and where we all have access to equal rights. It's science fiction and fantasy that's about our communities and about like imagining healthy communities for marginalized people.

                                    [00:21:16] And like, I feel like some of my favorite speculative fiction of the last few years has been about communities. And you know, a book that randomly comes to mind right now is Philip B. Williams's book Hours about a black separatist community in the 19th century of like formerly enslaved people, where it's about the life of the community and how they try to keep themselves separate and keep the outside world out and how that, you know, succeeds for a time, but not forever. And it's just, it's a beautifully written book. It was one of my favorite books of 2024.

                                    [00:21:50] Yeah, I mean, we're just blessed with so much incredible speculative fiction, not just centering marginalized people, but centering marginalized communities.

Annalee:                    [00:22:00] I think community is a huge part of it. And I mean, and that's why protests have to be communal, however you define that. I just read Megan Gidding's novel, The Women Could Fly on your recommendation, Charlie Jane, because you had been raving about it for, I want to say like a year. I mean, it's an incredible novel. Please read it now. I can't recommend it enough. And it is about a community.

                                    [00:22:26] It's set in an alternate United States where the witch trials never stopped happening and women and particularly women of color are being victimized and killed. They're being burned to death, you know, for being witches. And at the same time, magic is real. So there really are real witches. And of course you can guess that, you know, generally the women who are murdered are not actual real witches. And of course the real witches don't deserve to be killed and they are living in community.

                                    [00:22:54] But what that novel made me think of is an idea that I'm stealing from the radical Marxist critic, Frederick Jameson, who just died, unfortunately. So R.I.P. Jameson. Love you, dude. He observed that fiction has two kind of roles for us.

                                    [00:23:13] One is that it has this utopian element that kind of invites us in like you were talking about, like showing a community, showing a safe place, reimagining society to center people who are marginalized. So that's kind of the utopian function.

                                    [00:23:28] But it also has a negative and critical function, which allows us to look at our reality in a skeptical way or see through propaganda. And the thing that I loved about Giddings's novel, The Women Could Fly, was that it kind of has both. It has this very negative and critical element where we're in the point of view of a black woman who is being accused of witchcraft at various points in her life. And because of that mechanic, Giddings is able to remind us of how much in everyday life black women, black people are constantly aware that the law could come down on them at any time for any arbitrary bullshit reason and be like, “oh, you are ensorcelling my dog,” which is like kind of the level of accusation that you sometimes hear, especially right now against, say, immigrants, you know, where it's like “this person did a magical thing somehow that we need to deport them for.”

                                    [00:24:29] And so I felt like after reading that book, I had a heightened awareness of that feeling of that feeling of being watched, of being judged, of being potentially cast as an evil person in the eyes of your neighbors. And it's an uncomfortable, terrible feeling. But that is part of the role of protest fiction, I think, is to remind you to have that negative and critical element, but then also to have some liberatory utopian side as well to kind of not to sweeten things, but just those are kind of the two modes of protest and fiction, I think.

Charlie Jane:             [00:25:07] Yeah, I just want to finish really quickly mentioning a book I just read, which is Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Feldman, which is so incredible. You all need to hunt it down.

Annalee:                    [00:25:18] And we had Isaac on the show ages ago.

Charlie Jane:             [00:25:20] We did. Yeah, a while ago. And it's about trans artists who get swept up in a revolution against a dictator in a future version of Quebec or Montreal, a thousand years in the future. And it is very much about protests and about mass movements and about, you know, how art can be part of that. And like, there's a lot of discussions about art propaganda and mass movements and how to channel them. And it's just, it's such a beautiful book. I highly recommend it.

Annalee:                    [00:25:51] Yes. And I think that folks in Quebec absolutely will be glad to hear that their province is still around in a thousand years.

Charlie Jane:             [00:26:01] It's not called Quebec anymore.

Annalee:                    [00:26:04] But the city of Montreal is still there or it's just like...

Charlie Jane:             [00:26:07] I guess it's Montreal or Quebec. I'm not sure it's one of those two cities. I can't remember which one it is.

Annalee:                    [00:26:12] I mean, I'm voting for Montreal to survive, although I have lots of family in Quebec City. So Quebec City also, yay. Go for it. All right. So I think we'll leave it there, pondering the beautiful future of a small sliver of Canada.

                                    [00:26:27] And we're going to take a quick break.When we come back, we will be talking to andré carrington about Black speculative fiction.

[00:26:35] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Annalee:                    [00:26:37] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent, funded by you, our listeners through Patreon? That's right.

Charlie Jane:             [00:26:47] Yeah.

Annalee:                    [00:26:49] I like how you're sort of sarcastically like, yeah. But it's true!

Charlie Jane:             [00:26:54] No, I was like, yeah!

Annalee:                    [00:26:56] Yeah, channel the Kool-Aid man. Oh, yeah! So if you become a patron, you are making this podcast happen. You're letting me make really, really bad Kool-Aid man jokes. And you also get audio extras with every single episode. We have a mini episode every other week where we talk all about our extra thoughts that we have and our extra opinions. You also get access to our Discord channel where we hang out. So just think about it. All that could be yours for a few bucks a month.

                                    [00:27:27] And anything you give goes back into supporting us and supporting our producer, Niah, supporting all the folks who come in and do guest hosting. And of course, you're making our opinions even more correct. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.

[00:27:44] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Annalee:                    [00:27:47] Now, we’re excited to be joined by andré m. carrington. andré teaches at UC Riverside and he’s the author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. He’s received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Humanities Center. And this year, he published an anthology of speculative fiction by black authors for the Library of America. It’s called The Black Fantastic, and it is an amazing collection of established and new voices. I am loving it. You should definitely check it out. Thank you so much for joining us, andré.

andré:                        [00:28:20] Thank you for inviting me.

Annalee:                    [00:28:22] Yeah.

Charlie Jane:             [00:28:23] Yeah, it's so awesome to have you here. So there are a bunch of terms for sort of black speculative fiction. People use the term Afrofuturism. There's now African futurism. Adrian Marie Brown and Walidah Imarisha call it visionary fiction. Can you talk about why you chose the term black fantastic for this anthology and what that means to you?

andré:                        [00:28:45] Yeah, I picked it because fantastic is a nice way of addressing the lack of a boundary between science fiction, fantasy and other genres. I like that if you say fantastic, you explicitly mean fantasy and then you explicitly also mean the fantastical thinking about scientifically impossible or implausible things in science fiction.

                                    [00:29:15] And black fantastic is this phrase that in Black Scholarship, actually, this book by Richard Iton a few years back, used this idea of the black fantastic to kind of describe the cultural politics of blackness. And the sort of imagination of social movements in the black diaspora. And it got at this imaginative dimension of things that is not necessarily like realist and politics conventionally considered. And that was a really solid, great thing to see this reckoning with the fantastical and the speculative from a more conventional kind of politics and social movements line of inquiry.

                                    [00:29:58] And the phrase was just used in this exhibition that Iko Eshun curated in the UK with black artists whose work I had seen exhibited as Afrofuturist or speculative or black romantic or all of these different things. And that really gave me the sense that black fantastic would be a timely term that people would recognize. And that it kind of draws in that this is something that happens in fiction as well as in other art forms.

Annalee:                    [00:30:29] So, you may not remember this, but you and I met at a conference many years ago and you told me something that really stuck with me and that I've quoted a lot. It was about representations of enslavement in black science fiction. And you were talking about – we were talking about Kindred by Octavia Butler, which is a time travel novel. And you said what you'd found in your work was that representations of enslavement distort time in narrative and that it just kind of creates all different kinds of distortions. Of course, it was time travel. But in the introduction to the black fantastic, you kind of build out this idea to talk about ghosts and hauntings as part of the same distortion. And I wonder if you can just talk more about how time is handled in black speculative fiction, because it feels like a big theme in this anthology.

andré:                        [00:31:18] Yeah, yeah. I think every fiction writer has to figure out how they're going to manage plot and narrative. And it's really exciting that speculative fiction writers get to mess with that on purpose, that you don't have to take linear time or you don't have to take cause and effect seriously. And you can invite paradoxes and things like that in speculative fiction.

                                    [00:31:43] And you can also draw on alternate histories are a big part of the genre and alternate possible futures are a big part of the world making that inspires people to do this work. And I really appreciate seeing not necessarily time travel per se, but just alternate imaginings of how we live in time.

                                    [00:32:07] That there's fiction in the Black Fantastic anthology, Justina Ireland's story, Calendar Girls. It was meant to be kind of a dystopian near future, but it keeps becoming more and more true to the present with restrictions of reproductive rights and sexual freedom, which is terrifying. But in a way, it's a way of having insight into how people in the present live in conditions that we imagine as consequences of things that haven't happened yet. But there are consequences of things that have only happened to some people.

                                    [00:32:43] And the more we experience shifts in how much we are living in the present or how much we've been sort of pulled back in time by regression in society, the more I think it's useful to draw on storytelling like that.

                                    [00:33:03] Another example of how it's not necessarily time machines and time travel, but alternate thinking about time. I really got into Marlon James's African epic fantasy stories: Moonwitch, Spider King, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf. They take place in this mythic time. It's not exactly a sort of fantastical epic fantasy past.

                                    [00:33:30] And I kind of love that because we're so used to reading epic fantasy set in this imaginary European past and setting these gigantic, complex, overlapping narratives in not just a broadly mythical African ancient time, but even like a like a dream time, like a time of things that are not necessarily possible, but are very much fantastical, where there's magic and there's presences of ancestors in the world around us. Those kinds of stories and the storytelling traditions they come out of are really great resources for black storytellers.

Annalee:                    [00:34:16] So it's secondary worlds in a sense as well, or it's not?

andré:                        [00:34:20] Yeah, it's like, oh, it would be secondary worlds if people didn't actually live in that as their primary reality in real life. Right? I feel that when people posit that, “oh, there's a magical underworld alongside the real world we live in,” that in terms of like a difference in genre, secondary world is a good name for it. But sometimes it's not really a difference in genre. It's just it's a kind of realism or it's a kind of something besides the real that that black authors are tapping into when they're telling stories of how they experience things and become aware of things through storytelling that are not true in the realist sense, but true in the way that fantastical and mythical stories are true.

Charlie Jane:             [00:35:12] Yeah. So I loved what you said a moment ago about like dystopia, kind of dystopian futures kind of bleeding into the present. And like, you know, I feel like there's that William Gibson quote about the future is here is just not evenly distributed.

andré:                        [00:35:26] Yeah.

Charlie Jane:             [00:35:26] And I feel like what we're seeing these days is that the dystopian future is not evenly distributed like some people get it first. It arrives early for some marginalized people and then everybody else gets to experience it later. So I was wondering if you could just talk about like how the future plays into the Black Fantastic and like what are kind of how does it capture like the struggles that we're having over the future and who owns the future and like both like as the genre overall and in terms of the stories that you've collected in this anthology.

andré:                        [00:35:59] Yeah. I think some really like lesser seen, you know, lesser thought about future possibilities in some of these stories. The one by Alex Smith. It's this alternate future in a couple of ways. For one, it's like an alternate kind of not exactly post apocalyptic, but post something superhero world where superheroes and people with superpowers have existed. And also something has happened to change, you know, the viability of being a superhero and being a part of a society where that happens. And it's not exactly clear how different this world is from the one we live in, but it's clearly different in some important ways.

                                    [00:36:49] So it has it's a different future, but it also has a different past of its own. And that is always, I think, a really cool gesture that authors make that they don't have to tell you what's happened. They just sort of place you with the characters dealing with whatever has happened and you can guess and you can follow along.

                                    [00:37:07] I love that. It's also kind of an alternate future in that it comes out of a really robust Philadelphia Afrofuturist scene that Alex Smith curates events and parties and has people gathering together in really a cultural space for black folks and black queer folks, especially, that is part of a broader social world in Philly that I got exposed to just a little bit while I was living there. And I love that there's a sense of the future taking shape in places we are not always paying attention to, that the future is emerging in black and queer and trans Philly and the future is emerging in Detroit and the future has emerged in Chicago and futures are emerging from Silicon Valley. But those are not the futures we want.

                                    [00:38:00] So seeing how like alternate possibilities take shape, a part of that is seeing who is imagining the future for their own community or who's imagining community together and maybe not sort of on the dominant cultural landscape.

Annalee:                    [00:38:15] Yeah, there's one issue that I feel like comes up in a lot of these stories. And also you've you've talked about it in your own work where there's a sense that the future is sort of foreclosed for, you know, that there's futures that are closed off for black people and also, I mean, other marginalized groups deal with this in different ways, too.

andré:                        [00:38:36] Yeah.

Annalee:                    [00:38:36] And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, because I think this is something that I think a lot of maybe folks who are interested in science fiction and they see the future as like always this shining path that's like leading out of the present. And you're saying, no, actually, there's some futures that are closed down. I wonder if you could just unpack that a little bit.

andré:                        [00:38:57] Yeah, that that sense of foreclosure is really salient. I see it in a lot of ways. I mean, it's a part of the, I think, like the realist and the social scientific insight into black history and culture is that the future is a really tangible, practical, concrete concern for people in a way that's not speculative and imaginary, but really is right in front of you.

                                    [00:39:25] Like whether you can buy a home and actually move into it, whether you can leave your house or be in a certain county after sunset. Like, do you have a future today? Right? Like, can you get from point A to point B and survive? Like, to the extent that, you know, the probability of certain things is not distributed equally because of racism, it calls into question, like, how, how concrete, how, how present is anybody's present?

                                    [00:39:59] And racism makes a difference in that. Misogyny and violence against trans people make a difference in that. And all of the hazards that kind of shape how, you know, you can go about your day. You have a present that you broadly share with everybody else. But it's, it's foreclosed in certain ways in this concrete way that you know you belong to a constituency and you share a past with certain people for whom maybe the home ownership you have in your present isn't going to be in your future. Or maybe the the citizenship status that you are attaining isn't actually going to remain open, even though you've opened it through your actions in life.

                                    [00:40:36] Those kinds of things are very practical for black communities broadly in realistic fiction, in historical storytelling and evidence based, you know, insight into society. And I think that that stuff shows up in speculative fiction and gives, you know, gives some black science fiction and fantasy writing kind of a pessimistic tone, but also gives a kind of resourcefulness.

                                    [00:41:02] The thing that we identify with Octavia Butler especially, right, is that she depicts people in difficult and sometimes horrifying situations who get through it anyway. And that I think comes from a sense that people have lived through those situations and also people have died in those situations. So you can tell a story about what happens.

Annalee:                    [00:41:22] Yeah, I feel like Tananarive deals with this too in her work. I mean, we had her on a couple of months ago and we were talking about like, why is horror part of, you know, the black fantastic? And she was kind of raising a lot of those points as well.

Charlie Jane:             [00:41:37] Yeah, I mean, you know, changing topics slightly, like, you know, one thing that I've become more aware of recently is like the rich history of black speculative fiction that a lot of people don't know about. I was visiting Georgia Tech and the students there were doing a project where they were looking back through black newspapers for the first half of the 20th century and just finding just so many amazing science fiction stories that, you know, haven't been collected. Or they're hopefully working on an anthology.

                                    [00:42:04] And you're working on a book about radio plays based on black science fiction. Can you tell us a little bit about that? And when were these radio plays broadcast?

Annalee:                    [00:42:12] Tell us everything.

andré:                        [00:42:12] So I am working on this book called Audio Futurism. I know it'll be finished this year one way or another. When it's finished with me and when I'm finished with publishing it, that will be really exciting.

                                    [00:42:24] There's not so much a tradition of black speculative fiction in audio form, which is kind of intriguing to me in the same way that like there is totally a tradition of like black sonic fiction is one of the sets of terms that people use to talk about black music and performance in terms of like avant-garde and experimental music, like free jazz and the legacy of Sun Ra, but also black popular music that employs technology and imagines future and dreamscapes in all kinds of inventive ways.

                                    [00:42:58] So this notion of like black sonic fiction and sound as a way that black people do what we sometimes call Afrofuturism is really firmly grounded. And because I don't understand music as a scholar, I do understand narrative and adaptation and storytelling. And the significance of radio drama as an art form in general is a really important part of science fiction. It's a really important part of popular entertainment.

                                    [00:43:29] I always tell my students like, when radio comes about, it is as important as TV is. It sets the precedent for it. And when radio comes about, it's as important as social media is. It's how you know about the world and things happen in different art forms through this medium or through this technology.

                                    [00:43:49] And to the extent that black folks’ work makes it into these spaces that open up in these contingent and varied and intermittent ways, in the infrastructure of making audio drama, either on terrestrial radio for broadcast or now in digital formats and kind of a legacy or nostalgic callback to the dominance of terrestrial radio. When black folks’ work shows up, it kind of brings with it what is happening in the literature it draws from and brings with it the performance acumen and the traditions and the training that black performers and interpreters of those works have.

                                    [00:44:36] I don't think that it means that there is a such thing as black speculative fiction radio drama per se, but I do think that when black folks think and imagine and perform, that that work and that effort can make it into an art form like radio drama in a way that makes radio drama different. And once we imagine it as part of or as alongside the tradition of science fiction and fantasy radio plays, we get a different and more complicated story.

                                    [00:45:14] So we get the War of the Worlds in the 30s and we get the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the 70s and 80s. And across that span of time, the institutions that bring those things to the public also just occasionally bring like utopian and propagandistic stories about like black achievement and racial unity to the black public during World War Two.

                                    [00:45:40] That's one of the programs that I investigate. And some of the same venues that are established to air the world's greatest authors in BBC radio traditions or specific programming for women during like certain time slots and in certain formats and certain sentimental conventions. BBC radio are the same institutions that adapt Beloved by Toni Morrison and do something really different with that cultural space.

                                    [00:46:10] And those are the kinds of moments that I look at in this book. That there are moments when black authors work and black speculative fiction shows up in this format. It brings with it the stuff that is exciting about it. And it also makes a contribution to what's challenging and what's provocative about audio as a mode of reading. I really think of it.

Annalee:                    [00:46:33] That's so interesting about the shows during World War Two that were showcasing black excellence. It feels like that's almost a form of utopian fiction, right? Like, I mean, it's not fiction, but it's a utopian impulse to be like, this is a possible future. Or is that am I reading that wrong?

andré:                        [00:46:50] No, you are reading that right. I didn't. This is not a plant. That is that is what I say about it is that just making the effort. I mean, there are black radio programs in the beginning of the 20th century. And black people are on the radio a little bit in the beginning of the 20th century. But the most famous and the most broadly disseminated mode of interpreting blackness on radio is Amos and Andy. It's the same distortion that you see in other mass media in vaudeville and stage performance and film and stuff.

Annalee:                    [00:47:27] And that's not blackness. That's just whiteness.

andré:                        [00:47:29] Yeah, yeah. It's a story… 

Annalee:                    [00:47:31] doing its thing.

andré:                        [00:47:33] Yeah, yeah. It's a story that racism tells itself about who exists in the world and what we are like. But instead, having certain moments in certain spaces in Harlem, in this instance, from people who have been active in the black press, who are the kind of people who are both trying to connect with black audiences and try to make black concerns, you know, front of mind for each other, but also for the rest of the country and the world.

                                    [00:48:01] Those are very much the people who will do storytelling on radio that imagines, you know, a world that cares more about people across racial lines and a world that sees a way through fascism and Nazism that includes but doesn't oppose all the different kinds of radicalism that are going on.

Annalee:                    [00:48:21] That's amazing. Just to finish up, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what you're thinking about what speculative fiction, fantastical fiction, can offer us right now in the present in the United States in this period of violent authoritarianism. What can it give to us?

andré:                        [00:48:40] I have to think about this daily in the same way that I think we all have to think of how we are getting through this. I think one thing it can offer us is reading. The people who are bringing about this authoritarian nightmare, they don't read books and they don't like learning as a way of, you know, navigating society and finding your place in the world.

                                    [00:49:08] They don't forward a vision of learning about yourself or other people as a priority for anyone. So much of what they're concerned with is, you know, installing a certain imaginary version of the past and a certain ideal for the future that is stuck, that is trapped, that is profoundly unlearned.

                                    [00:49:35] And people have to be able to read. People love reading. People love deciding what to read and making choices for themselves. So one thing speculative fiction offers is that people read it because they like it. And just cultivating that desire and validating it, saying that people should be able to...

                                    [00:49:57] I'm not even like pessimistic or judgmental about it. People love blockbuster movies and action spectacles and that's great and it costs a lot of money and capitalism is going to kill us all. But storytelling and reading and learning from any art form is really profoundly valuable. And we know that because, you know, the authoritarian tendency is to take those things away from people or to seek to capture and control it.

                                    [00:50:24] So I really think that whether it is sharing the webcomic that you see that makes a good point or tells a good joke or it's reading books from your library so that it stays open or requesting books for your library so they can get them to you or getting into audiobooks and spending time listening to them. Just being able to do that is so important to everyone's quality of life. And being an advocate for that is one teeny tiny way that I hope I make people's lives more bearable.

                                    [00:51:08] And to the extent that writers making that kind of creative work have a role in this moment, it's really reciprocal. It's really, you know, I very much hope writers have the wherewithal to keep doing what they do under oppressive conditions. And I also really hope that we show that we care about them by, for example, not stealing their work in large language models and, you know, not trying to put actual artists out of jobs by using, you know, machine generated art, quote unquote art. And instead, you know, supporting people who use technology in innovative ways within their own practice and make cartoons and make films and videos and fun things.

                                    [00:51:57] And there's just so much to enjoy already. That's another reason that fascists don't like reading, because it gives you the sense that there isn't a lot in the world to love and to value. But there is, right? Instead of like stamping that stuff out and replacing it, you know, with whitewash statues. Like there's so much to actually enjoy that already exists in the world.

Charlie Jane:             [00:52:20] Yeah, I love that so much. And that's very powerful. And I'm going to carry that with me. andré, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

andré:                        [00:52:27] I am on the University of California, Riverside. I work there. So if you look at ucr.edu, you'll see me if you look for my name, you can find me on social media on Bluesky, just my name. If you type in andré carrington as one word, I will come up on there. And I'm on Instagram as @audio.futurism. And occasionally you'll see my dog there.

Annalee:                    [00:52:54] Nice. That's a good promise.

Charlie Jane:             [00:52:57] Love it.

Annalee:                    [00:52:57] Thank you again very much for joining us.

andré:                        [00:52:59] Thank you. Thank you. This is wonderful.

[00:53:01] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Annalee:                    [00:53:04] Thank you so much for listening. And if you're a patron, thank you for your support. You're buying us dinner, giving us enough calories in our brains to do an entire episode. And remember, you can find us on Mastodon, on Instagram, on Bluesky, and you can find us on Patreon to support us.

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                                    [00:53:46] Tell your friends about how our amazing podcast changed all your opinions and turned you into like a correct opinion having non-human animal. We'll talk to you later. If you're a patron, you'll have an audio extra mini episode next week. And if not, we'll be in your ears in two weeks.

Both:                          [00:54:04] Bye.

[00:54:05] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]