Say hello to Rochelle Spencer, soon to be Ph.D. in Afro-Awesomeness and Afro-Surrealism!
April 2016 Blog for Black Speculative Arts Digital Archive
By Stephanie Schoellman
Afro-Surrealism: Rochelle Spencer Q&A
The Black Speculative Arts Movement encompasses a host of hybrid genres. One of those alchemies is Afro-Surrealism. In order to more fully explore this mixture of Afro-awesomeness and surrealistic philosophy and expression, Rochelle Spencer magnanimously allowed BSADA to interview her.
Rochelle Spencer is an Afro-Surrealist author and scholar based in San Francisco Bay. She is co-editor of All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women Writers of Color (University of Wisconsin Press) and has been published in many renowned venues, including Poets and Writers, Callaloo, The African American Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, and Publishers Weekly, to name a few. She is a founding member of the Harlem Works Collective, a current member of the National Books Critics Circle, and her essay "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Woman" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. For more information on Rochelle's Afro-surreal doings and happenings, check out her website and Twitter feed: https://www.rochellespencer.com/ and https://twitter.com/rochellespencer.
Rochelle Spencer Q&A
(She responded in purple in honor of Prince.)
1) Your website describes you as being an author who writes Afro-Surrealist stories, which are in part “stories by and about people of color and female empowerment.” How do you define Afro-Surrealism and how do you see this genre (if genre is the appropriate designation) working within the Black Speculative Arts Movement as a whole?
First, I’m really excited about your project. The Black Speculative Arts Movement needs more study in general. Because of the Internet, more writers of color have the space and ability to publish than ever before, and I don’t think the current scholarship has been able to keep up with the number of texts that are being produced. One thing that brings me joy as a scholar is to be able to engage in conversations about these ridiculously understudied texts.
My dissertation, which is currently under contract with Taylor and Francis (formerly Ashgate Publishing) examines several new texts who are part of what I call a “Third Wave of Afro-Surrealism.” Afro-Surrealism, simply put, is both “Afro” and “Surreal.” It isn’t as futuristic or high-tech as its aesthetic cousin, Afrofuturism. Afro-Surrealism is interested in the contemporary, in the now, in how race—an arbitrary, surreal concept—has real-life effects. Racial trauma and the psychology of coping with that trauma is at the heart of Afro-Surrealism, but Afro-Surreal stories are also stories of joy, hope, humor, and resiliency. Afro-Surrealists texts demonstrates how racism is very real—people are murdered because of it, they lose opportunities because of it--but race itself is arbitrary. Afro-Surrealist texts recognize that when we look at race from different historical moments or from different geographical locations, we see that who has been considered “black” or “of color” has changed. This clash between real-life racism and the “made-up” idea of race means there’s almost always an element of absurdity in the Afro-Surreal text.
Though my scholarship currently focuses on the Afro-Surreal, I try to honor all of the Black Speculative Arts, from Afrofuturism and the Black Fantastic to DieselFunk and Animist Realism. I try to avoid what scholar Ifeoma Nwankwo calls “binaristic blackness”—the positioning of one form of blackness over another. My argument is that the black aesthetic is rich and complex, that all of Black Speculative fiction should be celebrated, and that because racism is a complex psychological phenomenon, the creative texts writers produce reveal different strategies for resistance.
2) What originally sparked your interest in Afro-Surrealist fiction? Which authors and scholars have been most influential to your work (both scholarly and creative) and why?
I’ve always enjoyed weird, strange fiction, whether it’s Franz Kafka or Toni Morrison, and they are two writers who have inspired my work. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is my favorite novel in the world, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God are two novels I love to read and reread. I think part of the reason I’m interested in studying them is to gain a better understanding of why I love them so much!
So those are all canonical works, but I’m also interested in some of Morrison’s newer work, Ishmael Reed’s recent novels and poems, and many of the graphic novels, films, short stories, epistolary-Tweet novels, and cross-genre texts that are coming out right now. One thing I’ve realized is that writing is a form of time travel; when you read, you can experience the actual words and ideas of someone who lived years ago, or you can imagine a future that hasn’t been invented yet. Afro-Surrealism tends be very aware of how it’s manipulating time because it examines how our everyday, present-day lives are influenced by our thoughts about the past and the future. That’s one thing about the genre that continues to fascinate me: writing is already a form of time-travel, but Afro-Surrealism forces us into an even greater understanding of how, in the present, the future intersects with the past.
3) As an author and scholar, how do your interests in the creative arts and in scholarship intersect and inform each other?
Logo Designed by Thaddeus Howze
In addition to studying Afro-Surreal texts, I also write them—and I try to support other artists! I’m founder of the AfroSurreal Writers Workshop, a workshop that aims to support writers of color creating strange, absurd, or weird art. Our aim is to build community and provide funding for artists and opportunities for showing work. Last month, we had an AfroSurrealism conference at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, where several local writers read or showcased their work. During the conference, we raised money and donations for the Prisoners Literature Project, which gives books to prisoners, and we also honored writer Juliana Jewels Smith, creator of the (H)Afrocentric comic. And currently, we’re working with the Great Wall of Oakland to curate a fellowship for Afro-Surreal Writers who are engaging in digital projections. All of this work has allowed me to interact with other writers and gain a greater understanding of the work they’re doing. As a scholar, this is helpful, of course, because I become aware of new and innovative work that may not have received scholarly attention. But, this kind of work is also helpful to me as a creative writer because it reduces the isolation and depression that many artists face. As a writer, you spend a lot of time alone, by yourself, immersed in your own thoughts. A lot of us are introverts, so it’s helpful to know that there is a community that will support and challenge us to do our best work. And, in the end, that helps us to continue to generate art and new ideas.
4) What are some of the challenges of writing and writing about Afro-Surrealist literature in the market as well as academia? What are some solutions to these challenges?
Because it's a new field, people don't know much about Afro-Surrealist literature. It's not Surrealism, though it was influenced by that movement, and it’s not exactly Afrofuturism or magical realism either. Some of the texts I’m examining are so new that there isn’t a lot of existing scholarship, and I know that I have to convince other scholars that an online source can be as valid as a traditional print source or that it’s okay to take a new approach to these texts.
The other problem isn’t so much with scholars as it is with other writers who worry, legitimately, that these categories will lead to marginalization. On online forums, I’ve seen writers say things such as “I want to be seen as a writer, and not as an Afrofuturistic or Afro-Surreal writer.” I understand that worry, but I think that writers should accept—and embrace—the idea that they can belong to multiple communities, that there are multiple ways of understanding and reading a text. For instance, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain was taught in Black Studies classes for years, even as Giovanni’s Room and Another Country were being neglected. Today, I think the LGTBIQ community has revitalized Baldwin scholarship by looking at his work from another lens. Baldwin belonged to multiple communities--he was a Black writer, a gay writer, an expatriate, a fiction writer and a writer of essays--and his work deserves to be examined from multiple points of view. Similarly, Catherine Ramirez’s work on Chicana-Futurism or Grace L. Dillon’s work on Indigenous Futurism may offer other ways of understanding texts. So, while I understand writers’ worries about being marginalized, I hope they see how my aim is to bring greater attention to under-studied texts, not less.
5) Tell us about your current project on the Dark Room Collective (and/or any other current projects).
I’ve spent the last few years interviewing members of the Dark Room Collective, the Boston/Cambridge-based writers collective, and their mentors and students, and I’ve been able to publish some of those interviews in journals and magazines, but I haven’t received a contract for the book. The Dark Room Collective may end up a chapter in the dissertation. The Dark Room Collective seems to have made the effort to revisit the Black Arts Movement’s idea that art is never entirely divorced from politics, while, at the same time, showing the range of ways that people can express blackness. The Dark Room Collective, like the current Afrofuturism or Afro-Surrealism movements, was inclusive of genre (the Dark Room Collective is primarily known as poets but they were also interested in music and film, and some were visual art curators), gender (of the three founders--Sharan Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Janice Lowe--two were women), ethnicity (though primarily African-American, two of the founding members, Patrick Sylvain and Danielle Legros Georges, were Afro-Caribbean), and sexuality (some members were also part of the LGTIBQ community). This isn’t to say that the Dark Room Collective was perfect because there have been some documented conflicts and problems within the group; however, I think their openness has definitely influenced Afro-Surrealism, and I think some members--John Keene, Janice Lowe, Kevin Young, and Tracy K. Smith--have produced work that can be considered Afro-Surreal or Afrofuturist.
Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Via “Dark Room Redux” by Rochelle Spencer Poets & Writers July/August 2012
The Dark Room Collective (left to right): Thomas Sayers Ellis, Tracy K. Smith, John Keene, Major Jackson, Tisa Bryant, Janice Lowe, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, and Sharan Strange.
6) Who are some authors and/or works you would recommend?
In addition to scholarly articles, I write book reviews, so I have the opportunity to read a lot and encounter many wonderful writers. There are so many writers I admire that it’s probably best to divide them into genre, but the texts below are a partial list of writers who seem to be exploring Afro-Surreal ideas. I’ve tried to include only Afro-Surreal texts on this list, but some of the writers listed also write Afrofuturism.
Poetry: Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars (combines Afro-Surrealism with Afrofuturism); Abdul Ali’s Trouble Sleeping; Ishmael Reed’s New and Collected Poetry
Short Stories/Novels in Stories: John Keene’s collection Counternarratives, Thaddeus Howze’s Hayward’s Reach, Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s Blue Talk and Love; Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories
Graphic Novels: Juliana Jewels Smith (multiple books), John Jennings (multiple books)
Novels: Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, Helen Oyeyemi’s boy snow bird, Victor LaValle’s Big Machine, Daniel José Older’s ShadowShaper, Tananarive Due’s My Soul to Keep, Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank, Mat Johnson’s Pym, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas
Online Criticism (from both a scholarly and a layperson’s perspective):
Graveyard Shift Sisters , Black Girl Nerds , the AfroSurrealism Wikipedia page, the AfroSurrealism Manifesto
Print Criticism:
Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, Ytasha Womack's Afrofuturism, Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley’s Black, Brown and Beige
7) What do foresee for the future of Afro-Surrealism--trajectories, trends, etc.? What do you hope for Afro-Surrealist fiction?
I think that we’ll see more writers creating novellas. The Internet tends to lend itself to shorter reads—maybe it’s harder to stare longer at the screen than at the printed page—but people are still interested in reading longer works. So, I think we’ll see more works being produced with a length midway between the novel and the short story. Also, Japan’s Akutagawa Prize is often given to novellas, and because Afro-Surreal texts are sometimes in conversation with those from other cultures, I think we’ll see more writers exploring this less-examined (in the West, at least) art form. We’ve also entered the era of micro-criticism, and I think if there is a particular genre you’re interested, we’re now in the era where you can find it--as well as highly specific scholarship about that genre. This will only increase over time. As people have more leisure time because of machines, they will have more time to produce and consume art, and people who love a particular genre or writing style will only want to read more of it—and more about it. So, someone who loves Surrealism or African culture will want to learn everything they can about related topics.
Finally, I think we’ll see more intersections between video games, film, graphic novels, virtual reality and traditional forms of storytelling. People will produce “written” texts that will appeal to all five of our senses.
My greatest hope is that by consuming more art, by reading more of people’s stories, we become a more compassionate society. I’ve read that reading fiction can increase empathy and decrease anxiety, and some of our worst actions are a direct result of a lack of compassion and our own fears. We hurt each other because we’re afraid—afraid of looking stupid or losing power--and we can only see the world from our own perspective. Maybe by reading and encountering those other perspectives, we slowly become kinder and more creative about solving some of the world’s challenges. I see Afro-Surrealism as a part of this.
8) Is there anything else you would like to include in this interview?
Each year, at the AfroSurreal Writers Workshop’s annual conference, we plan to honor a different AfroSurreal writer/artist, and in the future, we’d also like to provide scholarships to various writers to support their attending the conferences and workshops of their choice. Black speculative fiction writers Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes produce a writing for social justice workshop, and Voices of our Nation Arts (VONA) and the Hurston Wright Foundation offer several workshops that can help writers achieve their dreams. One of our goals is to fund writers to attend these workshops. We’re interested in working with writers, so please join us at afrosurrealwriters@gmail.com. We believe we as a community have to do all we can to support and strengthen each other, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Thank you Rochelle Spencer for contributing your amazing insight, invaluable experience, and dedication to the field. We at the Black Speculative Arts Digital Archive are so grateful for your time and interview.
