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In the rich, ever-expanding world of Black speculative fiction, the land is never just a backdrop. It is a living part of the people’s culture and heritage. In the wake of centuries of colonial extraction and the fallout from environmental degradation, a growing body of literature in the genre dares to ask: What might land look like when freed from the logics of an empire long gone? What agriculture might emerge when land is no longer a commodity, but an integral part of the people?
At the heart of this genre is the understanding that to reimagine land is to rethink our relationship to sustenance, survival, and sovereignty. For many Black communities, land has been more than an economic resource; it is kin, a sacred site, and a story. Yet the colonial past violently redefined land as property, decimating Indigenous agricultural systems and replacing them with extractive monocultures tailored to imperial markets. Independent countries have been shackled by foreign governments, forcing them into global debt.
Historically, Black writers have leaned on postcolonial realism to explore the lasting trauma of colonization. While this literary tradition remains vital, it has often constrained their imaginative scope. Authors of Black speculative fiction are crafting different narratives focused on the future, stories that move beyond a past defined by a Eurocentric point of view.
Writers like Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Tananarive Due, and Suyi Davies Okungbowa use their work to imagine new worlds and shift conventional narratives. They build alternate timelines where colonialism is no longer a definitive endpoint, but a historic milestone to be acknowledged, understood, and left in the past.
In Okorafor’s 2015 release The Book of Phoenix, a prequel to her 2010 novel Who Fears Death, the Nigerian American storyteller creates worlds where apocalypse is seeded in biocapitalism—the commodification of Black bodies, DNA, and land. But out of this devastation, an ecological consciousness arises, one rooted in ancestral memory and resistance to techno-imperialism. Here, land rebels begin to remember. In Okorafor’s imagination, agriculture is no longer about market-driven production, but about nurturing communities, healing, and rebalancing the earth. She constructs liberatory blueprints that map futures shaped by self-determination, ancient knowledge, and ecological reverence for who we are and where we came from.
In Binti, Okorafor gives us a space travel story that centers the Himba people of Namibia. The eponymous protagonist brings her heritage into intergalactic space, rather than shedding her culture in pursuit of futuristic progress. In Okorafor’s vision, Indigenous practices are employed as a literary catalyst and road map to the future. Binti’s braided hair, for example, coated in sacred otjize paste, shields her from harsh climates. In another scenario, the character’s mathematical genius drives her invention of useful technologies. Okorafor considers these aspects to be foundational to progress, not antithetical to it.
While Okorafor’s work bridges Indigenous identity and spacefaring futures, N.K. Jemisin grounds Black speculative storytelling in Earth’s geology. In Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Earth itself becomes a contested site of power and trauma. Her apocalyptic landscapes, where oppressed orogenes are able to manipulate tectonic forces, become allegories for radicalized control, ecological destruction, and systemic suppression of knowledge. Jemisin reconfigures geology as a metaphor for liberation, where her characters don’t merely survive empire, they literally reshape the planet from its ruins. These works resist the extractive logics that have long governed global systems—colonial, capitalist, and otherwise. They don’t just invert hierarchies or offer escapist fantasies; they build counter-infrastructures.
In these narratives, land is a living archive, a source of memory, identity, and regeneration. In these imagined worlds, food systems are integral to the speculative ecosystem. Whether through magical seeds passed down through generations or subsistence agriculture in post-collapse worlds, nourishment as an expression of Indigenous technology becomes a radical practice of continuity and care.
Black speculative literature is reshaping collective diasporic storytelling. Grassroots media platforms like Omenana, Jalada Africa, Brittle Paper, and anthologies such as Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Africa Risen provide fertile ground for emerging voices in the genre.
These platforms democratize access to publishing, bypass traditional gatekeepers in media, and promote narratives that dissent, dream, and regenerate. As Black speculative fiction gains visibility in dominant channels and organizing spaces, its resonance deepens. For those engaged in the struggle for Black food sovereignty and demanding our rights to basic needs, these stories have become a reference to better understanding the true nature of Black Indigenous histories and culture.
Black speculative fiction invites us to confront fundamental, often overlooked questions around what liberation looks like in the true sense of the word. What would grow in a world unruled by capital and conquest? As generations move along, who tends to the seeds, and who remembers the stories of our roots, if not ingrained in our arts, culture, and communities? In this way, Black speculative fiction becomes a site of praxis. It cultivates the psychological and cultural space necessary to imagine life beyond catastrophe, not through false hope, but through grounded possibilities. These authors are not simply trying to escape the destructive structures placed upon us all. They restructure Black literature into that which is imaginative, educative, and entertaining.
Black speculative fiction draws its power from refusing to view land as lifeless or inert. Instead, it animates it, imbuing it with ancestral wisdom, political memory, and speculative possibility. Such stories ask us to imagine different futures but to prepare for them by storing seeds, remembering stories, and rebuilding relationships with the soil that sustains rather than destroys. Amid current ecological collapse and corporate capture of food systems, this literature offers more than escape. It presents tools to assist organizers, activists, scholars, farmers, and more in their quests for Black liberation through systemic redesign. Black speculative fiction offers radical imaginings of land stewardship and food cultivation that move beyond the empire’s legacy of scarcity and toward a set of values that prioritize abundance, care, and collective thriving.
