Black Women Make Terrible Mortals

Body, Memory, Power & Worldbuilding in Black Women's Speculative Writing

Black women's speculative writing repeatedly asks questions that conventional narratives struggle to hold: Who controls the body? What survives catastrophe? What do we carry from our ancestors? What kinds of community become possible when the rules of the present no longer apply?

This lecture centers Black feminist imagination as a way of reading speculative literature. Sims traces how Black women writers use altered worlds, supernatural bodies, ancestral memory, horror, and radical worldbuilding to illuminate the realities of Black life while refusing to let those realities define the limits of possibility. Rather than treating speculative literature as an escape from social conditions, the lecture explores how the genre can expose systems of domination and make room for entirely different arrangements of power, intimacy, community, and selfhood.

In Conversation with texts by: Octavia E. Butler • Tigest Girma • N.K. Jemisin • Nnedi Okorafor • Tananarive Due • Jewelle Gomez • Tomi Adeyemi

Best format: 45–60-minute lecture + discussion; ideal for Black Studies, Gender Studies, literature, and humanities courses.

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STUDENT OUTCOMES

  • Use a Black feminist lens to interpret speculative texts.

  • Analyze the body, memory, ancestry, community, and power as sites of worldbuilding.

  • Explore the relationship between speculative literature and lived social conditions.

  • Discuss how Black women writers expand what counts as knowledge, history, and possibility.

A woman with vibrant face makeup lit by neon pink and purple lights, with blue eyes, glowing moon earrings, and a web-like pattern on her face. A spider with a glowing blue eye is in the upper left, surrounded by stars, and the text reads "The Patternmaster XX."