Your Android Ain’t Funky (or Robots Can’t Find the Good Foot): Race, Power, and Children in Otherworldly Imaginations

Imagination of the impossible is a common, delightful part of early childhood experiences, as are the content and contexts of what Donna Haraway calls SF, the multitude of possibilities for speculating futures and otherworldly imaginations. It is a wonder, then, despite deep histories of SF in African American intellectual traditions and recent further blooming of people of African descent in SF, there are so few young Black children in SF across literature and media. Not that there aren’t tweens and teens of African descent, even younger Black children with powerful voices, or a total absence of Black babies. However, grounded in a theoretical funk and underscored by an improvisational ethic, this chapter argues that such absences are the norm. As significantly, the authors also contend that an ongoing and growing attention layered, nuanced, writing with older Black child protagonists, should be more present in works about and for young children.