Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

Rivista | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale
Fascicolo | 58 | 2024
Articolo | The Strange Career of a Black Utopia

The Strange Career of a Black Utopia

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

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

Presentato: 29 Maggio 2024 | Accettato: 17 Giugno 2024 | Pubblicato 30 Settembre 2024 | Lingua: en

Keywords Charles Henry HolmesUtopiaScience fictionAfrofuturismAfrican American fiction


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