The Speculative Present

The following is a talk I gave in the spring of 2021, during COVID and when I was a (miserable) grad student working on a PhD in history. My studies focused on Black print culture, and understanding the ways in which fiction was used as a platform for Black social- and cultural criticism. While I left the program the following year, this little project was the culmination of years of trying to answer the question of how one might study a people that was brutally suppressed, without smuggling into one's research the biases and manipulations of their hegemons. Looking back on this project, I was surprised how much I recalled — my memory tends to vanish under stress, and fuck me if 2021 wasn't a stressful time — and how salient I think this argument still is. For those who have no background in the subject, much of Black american history has proven incredibly difficult to study. Even those texts that have been celebrated as "good" Black history (that is to say, Black American history…