Contemporary Afro-Surrealist Fiction: Transforming Racial Trauma into the Marvelous (Dissertation Abstract)

In the Afro­-Surrealist novel, a black protagonist enters a possible realm of the imaginary as a direct result of racial oppression. Odd or weird events occur throughout the Afro-­Surreal novel, but moments of racial trauma are presented as even more bizarre than the other unusual occurrences. The Afro­-Surrealist text's ambiguity thus marks it as different from other forms of speculative fiction, including fantasy and science fiction, in which the boundaries between the fantastical world and the imaginary one are more clearly delineated. The dreamlike Afro-­Surrealist text presents race as a fluid and nebulous concept and questions the rationality of not only the racialized protagonist, but also, a race-­obsessed world.