Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

The Strange Career of a Black Utopia

Ethiopia, The Land of Promise. A Book with a Purpose, by Charles Henry Holmes (aka Clayton Adams)

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Abstract

This essay presents archival information about Charles H. Holmes and argues that his understudied novel, Ethiopia, The Land of Promise (1917), represents an important chapter in the history of Afrofuturism and American speculative fiction. The literary critical relevance of Ethiopia emerges forcefully from Holmes’s intertextual dialogue with other utopian and science fiction authors, such as Martin R. Delany, Sutton E. Griggs, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frances E.W. Harper, Edward Bellamy, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Holmes’s critique of Jim Crow segregation enables the articulation of a “distinctly revolutionary” project for African American futurity.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: May 29, 2024 | Accepted: June 17, 2024 | Published Sept. 30, 2024 | Language: en

Keywords Charles Henry Holmes • African American fiction • Afrofuturism • Utopia • Science fiction

Copyright © 2024 M. Giulia Fabi. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOc/2499-1562/2024/12/001