"Explores afrofuturism as a narrative practice by applying it to canonical African American literary texts by Wheatley, Walker, Douglass, Jacobs, Delany, Hopkins, Hurston, and Wright; trans-historically rereads the texts as science fiction and argues that the black experience of spatial and temporal dislocation in America is akin to science fiction"-- Provided by publisher.

Part I, 1619-1903: The Afrofuturist vista and the possibility of freedom: Hope and freedom technologies -- Black uprisings and the fight for the future -- Of alien abductions, pocket universes, trickster technologies, and slave narratives -- Part II, Afrofuturism and classic twentieth-century African American novels: Black bodies in space: Zora Neale Thurston's Their eyes were watching god -- "Metallically black": Bigger Thomas and the black apocalyptic vision of Richard Wright's Native son -- Racial warfare, radical afrofuturism, and John A. Williams's Captain Blackman -- Conclusion: Into the black-o-sphere.