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  • 2 weeks later...

Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman: The New and Improved Magical Negro

In 2001, Spike Lee popularized the term the Super Duper Magical Negro (SDMN) while speaking to students at Washington State and Yale University. The reference was about the stereotype of the magical Black person who is written into the story to help the white protagonist on his journey. The characters are often uneducated, male, and desexed. They do not have families of their own (The Stand's Mother Abigail—the human race is her family) or desires of their own (The Legend of Bagger Vance's titular character—his sole purpose is to help the white character). Nor do they exist outside of the white characters' constructed idea of them (Noah Cullen—willingly dies to protect the white criminal character in The Defiant Ones). None of this is news. Everyone's been bombarded with the image of the passive, Black person who only wants to serve.

A little-mentioned incarnation of this archetype, however, has gone relatively ignored or unrecognized. Henceforth called the Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman (SDSPBW), this epitome mixes the fictional SDMN character with real-life stereotype of the Strong Black Woman to create a character who is a seemingly powerful representation of strong, self-assured authority.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The Black Fantastic: Highlights of Pre-World War II African and African-American Speculative Fiction

Africans, and those of African descent, have not been treated well by speculative fiction, both inside its texts and in real life. Anti-African racism is a fact of life in Western culture, and was even more pronounced before 1945. Not surprisingly, the number of works of speculative fiction written by black writers is low. But that number is not zero, and it's worth taking a look at the fantasy and science fiction stories that black writers produced before 1945...

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Why Arab Readers Need Sci Fi: 5 Questions with SF Author Noura Noman

AL: Do you think science fiction could (should, will?) have a wider Arabic-reading audience? What will help grow the audience for Arabic sci fi?

NN: From the response I have had on twitter, and from the handful of young writers who said they read it in English and were interested to read it in Arabic and write it to, yes, I think this is the time for Arabic SF. What I believe would make it more popular is to avoid using it as a way to “fix” Arab issues. I also feel that we need to break away from the boundary of planet Earth and write about other planets, other life forms. I think that’s what will get the young generation to become interested in it. They are sick and tired of our age old issues which we never succeeded in conveying to them in a way that would make them hope for a better future.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm growing wierdly resentful of Tidhar, I don't even know why. It's some sort of growing dislike for Osama, which I enjoyed more or less when I read it but which I keep liking less as time goes by and a simmering annoyance that he slammed Amod Oz and David Grossman in the one blog post that one time for political complacency or something. I was at the Rabin rally (19, on weekend leave from boot camp) Grossman spoke at after the second Lebanese war, after his son was killed. It mattered to me. Tidhar can stfu.

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a simmering annoyance that he slammed Amod Oz and David Grossman in the one blog post that one time for political complacency or something. I was at the Rabin rally (19, on weekend leave from boot camp) Grossman spoke at after the second Lebanese war, after his son was killed. It mattered to me. Tidhar can stfu.

That would be this post, for the curious.

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  • 4 months later...

Am I an ‘Immigrant Writer’?

The conventional wisdom about being a “minority” — how white-male privilege will cheat you out of your due — doesn’t really apply to writers. A minority author may well have an advantage.

The American fiction-reading world, though sometimes reproached for not translating enough contemporary literature from foreign languages, actually has a huge appetite for stories about other people who live in other ways. And an abundance of these stories are written by authors who embody the American and the “foreign” at once...

Publishers are a shrewd bunch, if “shrewd” can be applied seriously to people who sink money into the production of books, a seemingly losing endeavor...

And yet this label does pose some obstacles. Fiction strives to attain the universal through the particular; readers want to relate to characters, to see themselves.

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  • 2 months later...

Support the Afrofuturism Crowdfund Project

Author Bill Campbell (Koontown Killing Kaper, Sunshine Patriots), poet/journalist Edward Austin Hall (the forthcoming Chimera Island), and artist Professor John Jennings (Black Comix, Black Kirby Project) have assembled 40 extraordinarily talented writers who represent just a part of the changing face of speculative fiction.

Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism is the dynamic, genre-expanding end result.

Please help support these amazingly talented Mothership writers by donating today.

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  • 3 months later...

Wilson Looks to Defy Expectations with "Risky" New "Ms. Marvel" Series

As first revealed on Tuesday, this Ms. Marvel is Kamala Khan, the 16-year-old daughter of Pakistani immigrants, a shape-shifter, a resident of Jersey City and a Muslim -- making her one of very few Muslim characters at either Marvel or DC Comics, and already one of the most high-profile. The new "Ms. Marvel" ongoing series, debuting in February 2014, comes from the creative team of "Air" writer G. Willow Wilson and "Runaways" artist Adrian Alphona, who made a recent return to interior comics work on "Uncanny X-Force."

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