Ficções de poder e existência: a ficção especulativa em ascensão, narrativas de futuros pretos e uma análise de “A Quinta Estação” de N.K Jemisin e “O Último Ancestral” de Ale Santos

Abstract

Creating fiction is a practice that has followed human beings since the beginning of their journey. From this practice, vectors that govern society until this day were created. Literature, in turn, can be described as the art of creating and telling stories and, on many occasions, it can be the materialization of fiction. This wonderful movement that literature makes ends up inspiring the composition of genres, subgenres and narratives that shake and, at times, subvert the crystallized notions of what the literary art is, how and for whom it is produced. Speculative Fiction, a genre whose main characteristic is the speculation of the past, present and future through creative literary narratives, is one example of this process. Speculative Fiction is a phenomenon on the rise, as it enables the existence of works that challenge the rules of what has been produced so far by speculative literary genres and subgenres, such as Science Fiction. Thereby, Speculative Fiction, due to its diverse and embracing nature, opens space for productions and voices never or rarely considered, such as black speculative narratives, black utopia, and Afrofuturism, which appears as a response to the lack of black authors and their work in Science Fiction. Afrofuturism is a movement of contestation and transformation; its main purpose is the production of images and narratives created and starred by black people. Such exercise is fundamental and necessary when we consider the violent effects that the kidnapping of the Atlantic had on the people in the diaspora. The conception of narratives of hope, past and future for people who live in constant threat of genocide configures one of the most subversive aesthetics found in contemporary times and one of the most popular, if we take into consideration successful names and productions such as the film Black Panther (2018), the cinematographic work Medida Provisória (2021), directed by Lázaro Ramos, and the audiovisual production Black is King (2020), by Beyoncé. Afrofuturism, especially in recent years, has represented a very important cultural landmark for contemporary times. Therefore, this work aims to understand the factors that shape the emergence of narratives of futures from black perspectives and their influences on the construction of a possible new artistic-literary movement. To this end, we seek to undertake a literary analysis of the works The Fifth Season by N.K Jemisin and O Último Ancestral, by Ale Santos, in order to map the characteristics and particularities of this growing genre.