Black Aliens: Kinship in the Cosmic Diaspora

In Black Aliens, Joanna Davis-McElligatt examines extraterrestrial and interdimensional aliens in Black speculative media and culture, reading them as figural representations of a cosmic diasporic experience and charged metaphors for Black fugitivity and escape. As figures of the enslaved and their descendants, ghosts, time travelers, interstellar voyagers, immortals, and abductees, Black aliens are inherently disruptive figures. In her analysis, Davis-McElligatt foregrounds alien entanglements with terrestrial beings that generate new networks of kinship and relation—genealogical, reproductive, transspecies. As Black extraterrestrials form chosen kin-community with Black Earthlings, they extend the Black Atlantic beyond earthly boundaries. Analyzing prose, poetry, film, record albums, comic books, illustrations, art installations, and exhibition catalogues, Davis-McElligatt traces how Octavia E. Butler, Maisy Card, Sun Ra, and Dwayne McDuffie and M. D. Bright visualize aliens whose bodies and beings are subject to interpellation as Black on Earth. She argues that these creators intentionally locate the Black alien as a subject whose galactic bonds are constructed in and as narrative form itself, made manifest in plot, characterization, and narrativization. In recasting narrative spacetime, they reimagine Black entanglements, kinship systems, and histories as a cosmic diaspora. Read more