UC Davis

"Spacetime Manipulation: Difference and Futurisms in Black and Indigenous Speculative Fiction" draws connections between the manifestos of Black Lives Matter (as a transnational social movement for abolition started in the United States) and Idle No More (as a transnational social movement for decolonization started in Canada) and Black and Indigenous radical aesthetic practices aesthetics thematically and/or politically connected to those movements. Radical aesthetic practices are instances of cultural production that use time, space, and story to unsettle dominant structures⁠. In this project, the practices examined include: a time-bending Indigenous performance, a Black horror television show, an Indigenous zombie movie, a Black apocalypse film, Black and Indigenous monster-hunting novels, and the manifestos of Black Lives Matter and Idle No More. Through the analysis of these speculative aesthetics from the United States and Canada, this project troubles the discourse that separates abolition and decolonization as either unrelated or only legible through the lens of solidarity. This study builds on conversations within Black feminism and Native feminisms' conceptions of space and time to argue that radical aesthetic practices can cause epistemic and material bends in spacetime to realize other worlds. What if the path to abolition and decolonization require a different understanding of space and time? Through these conversations, this analysis takes up calls from scholars and activists to consider Black and Indigenous futures in relation and does so through queering spacetime.

My methodological approach involves a healing/encountering framework. In this project, healing involves moves toward abolition and/or decolonization while encountering reinforces the colonial-capitalist status quo. The framework analyzes each radical aesthetic practice through three overlapping phases. First, the films, performances and literature are considered separately in the unreconcilable place. Second, the analysis moves to the meeting point. The meeting point is a space where Blackness and Indigeneity come together, not in comparison, but instead in a tense relation. Third, I consider the aesthetics along the healing/encountering framework and evaluate whether the connection of the meeting point is closer to healing or encountering (or is some complicated combination of the two). This framework is rooted in Indigenous protocols of relationality, particularly those used by the Iroquois pre-colonization to safely move through the different tribal territories. The framework also prioritizes Black feminist theories of difference to move beyond normative moves toward comparison in Ethnic Studies. By applying this framework to cultural production from 2012 to the present, this study takes up a theorization of relationality that foregrounds difference and tension. The feminist/queer analysis of spacetime within speculative aesthetics opens up pathways of connection and knowledge, mirroring work happening "on the ground" in activist circles, to pull visions of abolition and decolonization closer together.

When critical radical aesthetic practices are considered together and through the erotic, they illuminate a long-standing power that challenges heteronormative time, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. This dissertation starts with the Black Lives Matter and Idle No More manifestos as speculative documents, and then enacts the healing/encountering framework through Black and Indigenous apocalypse films, two episodes of Lovecraft Country, and novels about time-traveling Black and Indigenous girls. Mobilizing Black feminism, Native American feminisms, queer of color critique, queer Indigenous critique, the dissertation situates these radical aesthetic practices and the visions of the artists as central to struggles for decolonization and abolition in the contemporary moment.