Audiofuturism unearths how radio adaptations of Black speculative texts bring the cultural and political objectives of twentieth-century African American literature to the public through sound and performance.
Listen to the soundscape I created for “Lead, Line, and Plummet,” a group exhibition at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Audiofuturism is under contract with Fordham University Press for release in 2026.
Audiofuturism foregrounds the concerns of African American authors and audiences to identify an overlooked tradition of Black cultural critique within the popular art form of science fiction radio drama. The fantastic genres thrived in audio and visual media as well as print in the twentieth century, making science fiction radio plays a treasured part of American culture. Yet the racialized conventions of literary criticism and media history have caused scholars to overlook distinct interventions into this art form from Black writing and performance. By unearthing this legacy, Audiofuturism reveals what we can learn by listening to the homegrown anti-fascism of the Black press in World War II, the bohemian counterculture that inspired Samuel Delany’s 1960s science fiction, the negotiations that brought Octavia E. Butler’s confrontation with the horrors of slavery to the internet, and Black British interpretations of the iconic work of Toni Morrison. This study draws on scripts, sound recordings, and archival records to reconstruct unique acts of literary adaptation. It demonstrates how performance renders aspects of the Black fantastic imagination that are legible in literature into part of an audible cultural heritage.