In Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction--including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures--to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Carringtons argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black...

Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Chester Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. He draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre, evaluating the artistic and symbolic representations of pimps, sex-workers, drug dealers, and political revolutionaries in African American...