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DC Field	Value
dc.identifier	ECF_article_621
dc.title	W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet»
dc.contributor.author	Elia Adriano
dc.publisher	Edizioni Ca’ Foscari - Digital Publishing
dc.type	Research Article
dc.language.iso	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://edizionicafoscari.it/en/edizioni4/riviste/il-tolomeo/2016/1/web-du-boiss-proto-afrofuturist-short-fiction-the/
dc.description.abstract	This article examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story «The Comet» in the light of the Afrofuturist movement, a transnational and interdisciplinary, theoretical and literary-cultural enterprise that has endeavoured to rethink the history of Black civilisation in order to imagine a different, better, future. A remarkable example of post-apocalyptic, speculative and proto-Afrofuturist short fiction, «The Comet» functions as a fictional counterpart of the influential key concepts – double consciousness, the color line and the veil – previously introduced by Du Bois and it also foreshadows further critical issues and tropes that would be developed later, namely Fanon’s psychology of racism and Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility. Moreover, as a proto-Afrofuturist work of fiction, the story prefigures the post-apocalyptic worlds of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler and becomes a parable in which the supernatural element of the toxic comet allows for interesting speculations on the alienation experienced by people of African descent.
dc.relation.ispartof	Il Tolomeo
dc.relation.ispartof	Vol. 18 \| December 2016
dc.issued	2016-12-19
dc.dateAccepted	2016-10-22
dc.dateSubmitted	2016-09-22
dc.identifier.issn
dc.identifier.eissn	2499-5975
dc.rights	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.identifier.doi	10.14277/2499-5975/Tol-18-16-12
dc.peer-review	yes
dc.subject	Afrofuturism
dc.subject	Afrofuturism
dc.subject	B
dc.subject	B
dc.subject	Double Consciousness
dc.subject	Double Consciousness
dc.subject	Du Bois
dc.subject	Du Bois
dc.subject	E
dc.subject	E
dc.subject	The Colour Line
dc.subject	The Colour Line
dc.subject	The Veil
dc.subject	The Veil
dc.subject	W
dc.subject	W
dc.subject	«The Comet»
dc.subject	«The Comet»

Research Article
open access peer reviewed

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: «The Comet»

Adriano Elia Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Italia

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abstract

This article examines W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story «The Comet» in the light of the Afrofuturist movement, a transnational and interdisciplinary, theoretical and literary-cultural enterprise that has endeavoured to rethink the history of Black civilisation in order to imagine a different, better, future. A remarkable example of post-apocalyptic, speculative and proto-Afrofuturist short fiction, «The Comet» functions as a fictional counterpart of the influential key concepts – double consciousness, the color line and the veil – previously introduced by Du Bois and it also foreshadows further critical issues and tropes that would be developed later, namely Fanon’s psychology of racism and Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility. Moreover, as a proto-Afrofuturist work of fiction, the story prefigures the post-apocalyptic worlds of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler and becomes a parable in which the supernatural element of the toxic comet allows for interesting speculations on the alienation experienced by people of African descent.

Published

Dec. 19, 2016

Accepted

Oct. 22, 2016

Submitted

Sept. 22, 2016

Language

Keywords: «The Comet» • The Veil • Du Bois • W • The Colour Line • E • B • Double Consciousness • Afrofuturism

permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-5975/Tol-18-16-12

Copyright: © 2016 Adriano Elia. 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.

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