Poe Studies

Poe and Racism

I find it fascinating that influential White scholars of American literature only seem to identify Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass in the context of Edgar Allan Poe. They do not cite African American literature and certainly not SF. Claims of Poe belonging to SF fall short of the mark in this regard beyond naming him as a founding father of the genre. As Morrison herself observes, "their refusal to read black texts—a refusal that makes no disturbance in their intellectual life—repeats itself when they reread the traditional, established works of literature worthy of their attention."⁷ In fact, early American literature specialist John C. Havard argued in 2013, "Poe's work should not be read in terms of his personal beliefs, as we know few conclusive specifics about Poe's racial and political stances."⁸ But I can, and I must. Poe's beliefs pervade his writing! Likewise, Terence Whalen, another nineteenth-century American literature scholar, back in 1999, cannily apologized for Poe's "average racism": […] not a sociological measurement of actual beliefs but rather a strategic construction designed to overcome political dissension in the emerging mass audience."⁹ This admission of guilt effectively pardons Poe. But what does "average racism" even look like? What exactly does average mean here: common, standard, normal, typical, regular, desensitized? Put simply, even if Poe did intentionally yield his personal beliefs to appeal to the masses, he is a racist. I don't have to guess at Poe's meanings. Poe tells me exactly who he is in terms of his friendships, his daily interactions in antebellum America, and especially in his writings. As Teresa Goddu, also a nineteenth-century American literature expert, rightly pointed out in 2000, "to assert that Poe's racism is unexceptional within the norms of his culture must not minimize its effects. […] Whalen's argument is in danger of foreclosing rather than reinvigorating the critical discussion on Poe and race."¹⁰ John C. Rowe was exactly right to claim in 1992 that "Poe was a proslavery Southerner and should be reassessed as such in whatever approach we take to his life and writings."¹¹ So, I assume nothing about Poe's racism. It is all there to be seen on the page.

Regarding his personal relationships, Poe had a friend in Judge Nathaniel Beverly Tucker via written correspondence. Both men admired each other's work. Both men published with the Southern Literary Messenger, where Poe worked as a writer, critic, and eventually as its editor for a time. Poe scholars [End Page 85] such as Bernard Rosenthal, Dana D. Nelson, and Betsy Erkkila have remarked upon a disputed review in the April 1836 issue of the magazine in relation to a couple of books on slavery, known as the Paulding-Drayton Review. As Rosenthal has reasoned, "only the authorship problem in regard to the Paulding-Drayton review has unnecessarily obscured Poe's pro-slavery views."¹² That deduction seems right to me, considering all the passes other scholars have given Poe on being a racist. "Whether or not Poe wrote the review," as Nelson indicates, "he elsewhere expressed proslavery sympathies—for instance, in his reviews of Robert Montgomery Bird's Shepperd Lee, Anne MacVicar Grant's Memoires of an American Lady […] and particularly in his stance on works by the noted Southern defender of slavery, Thomas R. Dew."¹³ For my purposes in this article, it actually does not matter who authored the review. What matters is that Errkila identifies the two as friends in stating that "Whether this review was written by Poe, as some believe, or by his friend Beverley Tucker, [it is] a defense of 'all our institutions' and 'all our rights' written from the collective point of view of the South."¹⁴ This link seems highly relevant because of what is known about Tucker. As a law professor at William and Mary, Tucker belonged to an elite extremist group of Southern pro-slavery Democrats known as the Fire-Eaters. They were secessionists and desired the South to form a new nation. Tucker has the ignominious distinction of writing the very first secession novel that advocated for race war and separation, The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future (1836). This novel imagines a future United States of 1849, where most of the South has already seceded to continue the practice of slavery. As Jared Gardner states, "Poe very much curried Tucker's favor, as evidenced by an early letter in which he commended Tucker's poetry ('I sincerely think your lines excellent') and a laudatory review of Balcombe in the Messenger ('the best American novel')."¹⁵ Again, it does not matter if Poe and Tucker ever met in person; their literary connection through the Southern Literary Messenger endorses a shared worldview. Therefore, Poe is guilty by association.

Poe most certainly knew Samuel George Morton, one of the fathers of scientific racism and a practitioner of the pseudoscience of phrenology, popular across Europe and in antebellum America. This pseudoscience involves the prediction of mental attributes, based on the physical measurements of the skull and its shape. In Morton's Crania Americana, which came out a year after Poe's novel in 1839, Morton claims that Whites had the largest brains, Blacks the smallest, and Indians somewhere in the middle; it supports all manner of racial stereotypes still used by the far-right today. For example, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray claimed in 1994 that "[t]he difference in test scores between African-Americans and European-Americans as measured in dozens of reputable studies has converged on approximately a one standard deviation [End Page 86] difference for several decades […] this means that the average white person tests higher than about 84 percent of the population of blacks."¹⁶ It may be a different century, but the racism remains unchanged. Much like Herrnstein and Murray's controversial renown, "Morton's fame as a scientist rested upon his collection of skulls and their role in racial ranking," according to the famed Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould.¹⁷ Lest I forget, Dirk Peters shares physical characteristics with Poe's Black characters. As Poe writes of Peters, "His head was equally deformed, being of immense size, with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes)" (49). In this regard, the "deformed" head of Peters "with an indentation on the crown" would suggest that he was a violent Black man and this characteristic is unassailable in terms of nineteenth-century racial science. Medical ethicist Harriet A. Washington writes that phrenology "involved determining personality (including a propensity to violence) by interpreting the shape of the head [where] scientists compared the values for various races and each 'found' the lowest intelligence in blacks. Furthermore, each detailed numeric was determined to be static and immutable."¹⁸ This long-discredited belief system adapts scientific nomenclature to justify racism. Poe once "wrote in the Messenger in 1836," as stated by Gardner, that "The study of heads and skulls […] 'as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings."¹⁹ Clearly influenced by the racial science of his day, Poe engages in pseudoscientific pandering on Black character and emotion in his lost race adventure.

Pertaining to his daily life, Poe came across the enslaved all the time. But he also directly participated in the sale of another human being. According to J. Gerald Kennedy, "In December 1829, during a stay in Baltimore with his aunt, Maria Clemm, he apparently acted as her agent in the transfer of a slave named Edwin to a certain Henry Ridgway for a term of nine years."²⁰ Apparently? There is no apparently to it. Poe's name is on the bill of sale and Kennedy shares it in figure two, chapter 9 of his collection.²¹ This sale by Poe of a Black person for forty dollars, ironically to an illiterate free Black person in Henry Ridgway,²² represents the ultimate dehumanization, the ultimate racism. Incontestably, Poe was an active and knowing participant in the peculiar institution. On this evidence, it is hard to ignore that racism was a part of Poe's life as well as his work.

To reemphasize my point, Poe's short fiction provides plenty of evidence of his racism. Three stories feature racist depictions of Black servants—"A Predicament" (1838), "The Man That Was Used Up" (1839), and "The Gold-Bug" (1843)—and two more include images of Orangutans often associated with Black people—"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and "Hop-Frog" (1849). Obviously, Poe believed in racial stereotypes such as blacks being [End Page 87] inferior to whites. Along these lines, "No Poe text," as Kennedy remarks, "uses blackness more tellingly than Pym to elucidate whiteness as a racial construction."²³ By rebuking Poe on this charge, my article provides a sense of philosophical catharsis and late-arriving social justice.

Poe and the SF Megatext

The culture that produced Edgar Allan Poe concurrently shaped the SF megatext with its tales of lost races and lost worlds, ripe for economic conquest at the advent of first contact. We are talking about hollow earths, unknown islands, and undiscovered lands, where these lost peoples reside, where monsters can be found, and where violence ensues, whether these places represent utopia or dystopia. Poe adapts such popular themes over the last third of the novel's twenty-five chapters. Poe's novel contains alien encounters, evolutionary themes, strange landscapes, and pseudoscience—tropes that will have a long-lasting impact on the development of SF and that demonstrate a historical relationship to the genre and in turn its relationship to colonialism.²⁴ Consequently, all lost race tales connect to Poe's novel through the megatext and his contribution to SF resonates across the "vast and interconnected web of meanings that exceeds what appears in any single text."²⁵ When Johnson retells Poe's narrative through the lost race and lost world metaphors, Johnson creates an intertextual connection to the megatext whose meaning radically differs from Poe's in its Afrofuturist critique of race and racism, with Johnson's novel taking off from the final third of Poe's storyline.

In the interest of preserving space, I will engage the megatext only briefly as it relates to Poe's standing as a founder of SF. Comparisons of resemblances between Adam Seaborn's Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery (1820), an Antarctic sea-adventure quest featuring a hollow-earth, a lost land, and a lost race, and Poe's Narrative prove useful in establishing such connections. Other texts worth comparing that provide lost world entries encompassing the world's polar regions include James DeMille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Land That Time Forgot (1918), and H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1936). Hopefully, this list shows that Poe influenced the writers who came after him. As John Rieder explains, "Studying the beginnings of the genre" relies on "observing an accretion of repetitions, echoes, imitations, allusions, identifications, and distinctions that testifies to an emerging sense of a conventional web of resemblances."²⁶ With this idea in mind, we can see that evolving science-fictional emblems repeat themselves across time. In fact, Poe has been associated with SF since April [End Page 88] 1926. In the premier issue of Amazing Stories, the first SF pulp magazine, editor and publisher Hugo Gernsback writes, "Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of 'scientifiction.' It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread."²⁷ Poe's writing displays various genre markings consistent with the SF megatext, such as reasoned extrapolations that feature scientific rationales of his day, as racist as they are, and vivid descriptions. My point is that Poe used themes vital to the SF mega-text, establishing why he is important enough for Mat Johnson to engage.

When we encounter the blackest of Black people, the lost race on the imaginary island of Tsalal, in the farthest south possible, the Antarctic, Poe's racism becomes discernable. Consider Poe's account of first contact between the crew of the Jane Guy and the Tsalalians, who "commenced a loud jabbering all at once, intermingled with occasional shouts, in which we could distinguish the words Anamoo-moo! and Lama-Lama!" (163). This meeting of two different human groups trying to communicate establishes Poe's racializing alien metaphor. Readers do not actually know that the strangers are Black yet, but their "loud jabbering" represents a Black stereotype of being loud, where Poe pathologizes his cultural values with respect to communication by equating Black speech sounds to bothersome inarticulate noise. As Morrison states, "We need to explicate the ways in which specific themes, fears, forms of consciousness, and class relationships are embedded in the use of Africanist idiom: how the dialogue of black characters is construed as an alien, estranging dialect made deliberately unintelligible by spellings contrived to disfamiliarize it."²⁸ Thus, Poe renders them effectively inhuman, if not alien, at which point communication becomes impossible. The Tsalalians cannot speak for themselves, unfavorably determining what constitutes humanity through cultural and racial difference generated by a nascent American imperialism. Poe flexes his authority as a White man in this rendering of the alien Blacks that fully demonstrates the strength of racism in early America. Johnson sees fit to challenge Poe's demonstrable racism, which produces disorientation and trauma in Black readers of Poe's novel, a feeling of science-fictional Blackness typical of Afrofuturism generated by the reading experience itself.

Poe's daemonic genius also breaks through by transforming Dirk Peters into a White man, prioritizing Whiteness and its intended and lasting privilege. Early in the Narrative, Pym tells us that the mother of Peters was "an Indian squaw of the tribe of Upsarokas" and that "[h]is father was a fur-trader, I believe, or at least connected in some manner with the Indian trading-posts on Lewis river" (49). What I find interesting here is that Pym has no idea about the race, ethnicity, or nationality of Peters's father. "The real anxiety in Pym," writes Jeffrey Weinstock, "is not over racial difference but rather over [End Page 89] the possible elision of that difference."²⁹ It could be that the ambiguity generated by the miscegenate body best represents Poe's own racial unease. As Goddu remarks, "Reading race through the cipher of Poe is useful not merely because it gives insight into the author's particular political position or racial psychology but because it illuminates a wide range of antebellum cultural configurations that intersect with slavery and race."³⁰ I find this point interesting because it is roughly ninety years after Narrative that the supposed "one-drop rule" neatens up racial boundaries. Whites of Poe's generation would be familiar with grades of Blackness and the idea that those grades make a difference. Consequently, Peters is of a mixed-race background—he could be part White or he could be part Black to go along with his indigeneity.

But in keeping with early American social mores, Peters's racial designation should come through matrilineal descent, that is until Pym bestows Whiteness upon Peters after they are the only survivors of the rockslide ambush orchestrated by the Tsalalians. Pym remarks: "[w]e were the only living white men upon the island" (188). This astonishing transformation from racial other to White man occurs in terms of racial formation optics "under great pressure and with speed" because of the danger the Tsalalians represent.³¹ Pym metaphorically makes Peters into a White person because of the violent trap sprung by the Black Tsalalians, a clear result of the situation.

The stunning deracination of Peters, his makeover into a member of the White race, irrespective of his brutishness, seems somewhat fantastical. Pym acknowledges this sentiment himself "in speaking of Dirk Peters" since his "narrative […] in its latter portions, will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity" (50). And the Peters transformation into a White man is one of them! As Weinstock contends, "The shift from 'half-breed' to 'white man' symbolizes the slippage of the racial signifier as, in comparison with the blackness of the islanders, Peters becomes whitened."³² Pym also attempts to anchor this token Whiteness by "trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of [his] statements" (50). Pym metaphorically removes the pathological stamp of Peters's race in granting him a normalized White skin color.

The conferring of this social and political personhood, as it were, has nothing to do with nineteenth-century science. It has nothing to do with Peters's body. This unmaking of Peters's otherness not only occurs in an ontological context, but in a temporal sense, too, in that Poe grapples with the changes occurring in his own time period. The truth of Peters's race "makes use of eighteenth-century theories of racialization that assumed one's racial status to be a reaction to circumstances."³³ Thus, Poe merely articulates his obviously [End Page 90] racist beliefs about Black inferiority in this conversion. As Nelson suggests, in "acknowledging the racist dimension of Poe's work […] we must at least consider the cultural work performed now by masking that aspect of his work."³⁴ In this reconsideration, many contemporary Poe scholars have shrewdly helped to place Poe and his writings outside the brand of racism, essentially giving him a pass to shut down the conversation regarding Poe's prejudicial thoughts as a great early author of American fiction. Make no mistake, Poe is great but also racist with "quite visible" opinions in that "he supported slavery both as a southerner and as an individual."³⁵

An Afrofuturist reading liberates Poe's text in seeing the racial stereotypes, discrimination, and oppression promoted across the 185 years of this novel's existence in the lifetime of the United States of America. In keeping with Kodwo Eshun's notion that Afrofuturists perform as "archeologists" in reconstructing memories from this past, a past that wants to be forgotten, it "has been necessary to assemble countermemories that contest the colonial archive."³⁶ Mat Johnson excavates this past with his extraordinarily imaginative retelling of Dirk Peters by transforming him back into a Black man. Hester Blum asserts, "Johnson recenters Peters and White supremacy from the periphery to the core of any retelling of Arthur Gordon Pym's adventures" because of such powerful digging.³⁷ Indeed, Johnson accesses the transhistorical feedback loop to create a Black picture of Peters from the racist fragments of Poe's antebellum moment and brings it forward into our twenty-first century moment to indict the many harms of racism and to safeguard the work of Afrofuturism in promoting the possibility of social change in this counter-story.

Johnson, Megatexts, and Passing

With Dirk Peters recast as a Black man of mixed-race descent used as a link between texts of different eras, Johnson pulls Poe and his novel into contemporary SF and Afrofuturist circles. While Poe imparts a bit of gravitas to SF through his combination of racial science and speculation, Johnson satirizes the racist assumptions of Poe in this critique of racial passing by inscribing the Afrofuturist iconography of Pym in this anachronistic comparison. Racial science functions as the anachronism, as I see it, because it has long been disproven yet remains harmful as a thing out of place in the twenty-first-century United States. Racial science wrongly enables concepts such as racial passing to exist.

In simple terms, racial passing means the ability of a Black person to pass for a White person. In SF, passing would be the ability of a robot or artificial [End Page 91] intelligence to appear human enough to fool humans. But for Afrofuturism, passing represents a hackable skin technology in response to nineteenth-century racial science, allowing a Black person to go completely unnoticed by any White person, particularly those in power, exploiting the weaknesses of the American racial caste system by deeply manipulating the "social codes pertaining to black bodies."³⁸ Hence, Johnson combines the absurd logics of racial science and social codes in his re-creation of Dirk Peters, allowing Peters to escape his race. Afrofuturism makes a claim on this imagery through skin color, where the familiar is made strange to help us see our world in a new way.

Johnson cleverly grants Peters a Black makeover through the discovery of a lost and shabby manuscript sold by the book purveyor Oliver Benjamin to Chris Jaynes. This discovery mirrors many lost world and lost race narratives in the SF megatext, prompting a fantastic voyage to an unknown land from an old document like a book or a map. Relevant examples include Jules Verne's classic Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self (1903), the latter remarkable as an African American entry into this lost world genre. While there are no maps of uncharted territories leading to Tsalal in Poe's Narrative, there is lost territory with a lost race in his proto SF. Johnson's inclusion of the missing and unknown Peters manuscript is a stroke of genius that allows Johnson to cement Poe in the Afrofuturism megatext by following a broad SF pattern and picking up where Poe left off.

While Johnson's novel clearly belongs to both megatexts as a genre work, it also fits well within the neo-slave narrative tradition best represented by Octavia E. Butler's Kindred (1979) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Bernard W. Bell first devises the phrase "neoslave narrative" without the hyphen in 1987 to describe contemporary Black writers as "fabulators" who "combine elements of fable, legend, and slave narrative to protest racism and justify the deeds, struggles, migrations, and spirit of black people."³⁹ Further developing Bell's definition, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy adds a hyphen to neo-slave narrative, perhaps signaling a twenty-first-century move toward personhood for enslaved Blacks, and explains that the genre represents "contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative."⁴⁰ Thus, Black authors of today benefit from the transhistorical feedback loop to comment on current racial politics in the United States by largely adhering to the structure of actual slave narratives and offering further resistance to oppression.

Johnson's novel clearly fits the neo-slave narrative paradigm. Johnson takes a moment to reflect on the cover of the Peters manuscript, which is much like the engraved frontispiece of Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself. Chris describes [End Page 92] the image of the man on the hand-stitched cover as "the etching of a pale man, mulatto by feature and skin tone: his hair hinting at the slightest kink, thin lips betrayed by a wide nose and the high West African cheekbones" (38). And then Chris reads the title: "The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself" (38). Johnson uses the first two conventions identified by James Olney—"[a]n engraved portrait" and "[a] title page that includes the claim, as an integral part of the title, 'Written by Himself'"—to give the "true" narrative of Peters the feeling of authenticity.⁴¹ Of course, we recognize the irony in Chris's acceptance of this fictional account as being true in the story world. "Coloured Man," an important part of the title, establishes the Blackness of Dirk Peters while simultaneously divorcing him from his race and granting him personhood through this more inclusive term in the United States. In other words, he does not use slave to describe his status or experiences in the imaginary nineteenth-century world where slavery thrives in the Americas.

This painstaking attention to historical detail on Johnson's part creates the fictional world that draws its audience inside history asymmetrically with time a bit out of joint, thus, granting Johnson's novel both a science-fictional and Afrofuturistic feel of unfamiliarity, tapping into White and Black anxieties in his social commentary on the racial optics of passing. Racial prejudice has deeply impacted American history, culture, and literature; Johnson's Afrofuturistic engagement with this traumatic past of racial difference draws on the moments of hope reflected in the slave narratives of Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Solomon Northup, and Harriet Jacobs,⁴² all mentioned in Pym, which, in turn, produces the optimism that sends Chris to Antarctica in the present, in search of a Black utopia, free of Whites, free of race, free simply to be.

In the novel, Chris eagerly purchases this manuscript upon learning that Dirk Peters actually existed, irrespective of his race, corroborating the veracity of Poe's novel and "Tsalal, the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland […] uncorrupted by Whiteness," just waiting to be found (39). He hopes to repair his tarnished academic reputation and earn scholarly fame, as well as make a fortune in Antarctica by enlisting the aid of his best friend, Garth Frierson, and his cousin, Booker Jaynes. This remarkable transformation of Dirk Peters from Native American to White to Black across the two novels represents a singular description of literary passing. The passing metaphor and its mythology matter here because it "marks the transgression of, and thus lays bare, the paradox of unequal entitlements in the land of equality."⁴³ Passing generates social anxiety in White people with respect to the performance of identity as a means of integration. Likewise, it generates social anxiety in Black people who fear being caught in the act of passing. Along these lines, Johnson adapts [End Page 93] Poe's characters and repurposes Poe's only novel to advance his own political critique of racism, its injustice, and its various harms in his Afrofuturist satire.

After Chris meets the actual Arthur Gordon Pym living among the Tekelians, Chris takes a moment to claim his own Blackness since Pym mistakes him for a White man in the Tekelian homeland looking to trade his shipmates as slaves. Chris tells us: "I am a mulatto in a long line of mulattoes, so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But […] I am a black man who looks white" (135). He will not victimize himself as a tragic mulatto belonging to neither race completely; he attempts to decenter Whiteness in his investigation and teaching of early American literature such as Poe in his possessed hunt for "the intellectual source of racial Whiteness" (8); in his deeply unpopular course "'Dancing with the Darkies: Whiteness in the Literary Mind'" (7); and in his desire to locate his own Afrotopia in Tsalal.

In general, then, Johnson wittily engages with persistent political and social issues stemming from racial constructions as he ironizes and critiques skin color, among other things, in the context of the supposed post-race era in which his novel is written. Consequently, Chris Jaynes's hacking of the racial social codes in The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters, disrupts, if not compromises, Poe's novel and its influence on America, SF, and race, proving its influence on the Afrofuturist megatext.

Antarctica and the Clash of White Civilizations

Pym segues from a mockery of academic life for a Black faculty member to an Antarctic adventure story with environmental, apocalyptic, and utopian strands threading through a continuing racial binary. The entirety of the plot depends on suspending disbelief, accepting the existence of the fictional Peters and Pym, allowing them to live despite the fantastic elements, and momentarily believing the veracity of Poe's novel. I previously mentioned that Pym survived, but I did not say he has lived for 200 years by drinking a "liquor" that "tastes like fermented whale piss" which the Tekelians distilled for themselves, a beverage that Pym calls "the drink of the Gods […] the elixir of life" (198–199). Regardless, such things necessitate a lot of disbelief across two novels, and Johnson banks on his audience to suspend theirs in their enjoyment of ironies, while simultaneously challenging them to examine his race metaphors.

Using the planet's southernmost, least populated, least explored, and most inhospitable continent as the setting, Johnson creates two discordant White [End Page 94] worlds upon which to offer scathing social commentary as Chris and the Black crew members encounter them. First, he revisits a past social structure in this forbidding environment through a nostalgic return to the antebellum South as represented by the White and giant Tekelians. And second, he also envisions a White utopia, a futuristic biodome in the middle of Antarctica, built by the reclusive White artist Thomas Karvel (modeled on the deceased American painter Thomas Kinkade, self-described as a "Painter of Light"). The heat put off from the BioDome's machinery slowly melts the ice above the Tekelians' home cavern, while the crew of the Creole is "indefinite[ly] indenture[d]," putting the two worlds into direct conflict through this localized global warming metaphor.⁴⁴ These imagined potential futures outline the poor response to climate change and the call for social justice that Johnson combines into environmental racism in his Afrofuturistic flight of fancy.

Instead of finding the black-skinned Tsalalians, Chris and company first encounter the giant white beings indigenous to Antarctica that Poe tells of at the end of his novel. Chris takes a moment to describe the "mountainous creatures" wearing "white robes" (122). Jennifer M. Wilks mentions how "the Tekelians evoke the similarly attired Ku Klux Klan" with their white "'hooded capes' and menacing stature."⁴⁵ They certainly become so after Chris and company renege on their trade agreement brokered by Pym as a translator—Little Debbie snack cakes in exchange for two Tekelians.⁴⁶ The crew had agreed to take Pym and two Tekelians North, telling Pym that they will function as ambassadors while Booker and his colleagues hope to exploit the "snow honk[ies]" (105) for material gain. The deal falls apart when the team fails to deliver the promised cakes because the outside world appears to have been destroyed. But the Tekelians do enslave them and live up to Booker's expectations of "how all White people were […] racist" (145). The trade deal falls apart because of how the encroaching outside world ends, destroyed by unnamed socioeconomic difficulties caused by climate change and conflicting political systems. In his use of an apocalypse and slavery, Johnson draws on two well-documented themes in the Afofuturist megatext.⁴⁷

Unfortunately, the Black Americans, incapable of blending in with the native Antarcticans, become objects of labor for the Tekelians because of the incurred debt from the broken contract. This debt will take roughly a hundred years to work off, according to the Tekelians. With the indigenous prevailing, Johnson causes us to look at our society more deeply with this humorous and biting moment—funny, because of the snack cakes as the medium of exchange; critical, because the Creole crew is just as self-serving as the Karvels and other Whites portrayed in the novel; and, sarcastic in that Black people are enslaved again. The Tekelians' responses to the busted commitment merely emulate and [End Page 95] recycle something that resembles the peculiar institution. The prevailing pressures of history dictate that Chris must write his own account to provide a more accurate record about the circumstances of his brief time enslaved by the Tekelians. Since the Tekelians are native to the polar region, Chris's writings end up recalling the genre of the captivity narrative in which White women described being taken and held as collateral by Native Americans.⁴⁸ The Tekelians hold Chris and his partners captive while Chris and company construct the Tekelians as "other" in terms of race, beliefs, and customs and find them uncivilized as they submerge into Tekelian culture.

Johnson merges the antebellum and post-racial eras to suggest the impossibility of ending social inequality with respect to race and gender.⁴⁹ This temporal collapse of moments in racial history precedes the fall of both White civilizations. As Wilks accurately hypothesizes, "this provocative collapse of historical time and social progress [allows] Johnson" to redouble "his engagement with the neo-slave narrative by imagining the enslavement of his 'post-slavery' characters" while also exploring the perils of utopia in this near future through questions of power that ultimately negate the utopian vision.⁵⁰ Quintuple strands—racism, gender discrimination, class division, pride, and greed—woven together into a self-igniting fuse by Johnson ensure the mutual destruction of the Tekelians and the Karvels in an ideological race to perpetuate White supremacy with Black participants on both sides.

Thomas Karvel, a technocratic visionary, uses his vast wealth to create his own utopian land in the BioDome, modeled on his painting, to replicate a vision of America that never was, right on top of the invisible southern empire that is Tekeli-li. Karvel symbolizes the abstract liberalism of color-blind racial ideology, pretending to respect difference without truly being open to new ideas that might interfere with his own rights while further abstracting his racial concerns to seem sensible. For example, Karvel allows Chris and Garth to stay inside the dome but out of sight, segregated, stating, "'I can't see that from my place [but if you n]eed anything, just holler, 'kay boys?'" (243). He naturalizes the separation in forcing them to live apart from him and his wife and minimizes the discrimination with a seemingly friendly "'kay boys," but by referring to adult Black men as boys, he infantilizes them in a racist fashion.

Johnson addresses the subtlety and flexibility of contemporary racism at the novel's climax by flipping the Tekelians from White to indigenous, in terms of how his audience perceives their identity. Similarly, he critiques the occupation and exploitation of Tekelian lands by the Karvels that results in genocide to express an indefinite anxiety over the continual damage that racism inflicts on Blacks and Whites alike. Both civilizations fall as a result of long-running prejudices which also reflects a fear of the changing racial and [End Page 96] social demographics in the United States. He offers us an Afrofuturist warning about a post-racial world bound to a color-blind ideology that willfully sanitizes, if not forgets, history, creates food deserts and income gaps that are so very difficult to overcome, and speeds climate change, while still endorsing racial violence to support a flagging White hegemony.

Brave New Brown World

But Johnson also conveys a smidgeon of hope in his near-exact mirroring of Poe's Narrative. In Poe's novel, Dirk Peters and Pym take a Tsalalian named Nu-Nu hostage as they flee from Tsalal. The black-skinned Nu-Nu dies suddenly in the presence of a giant white Tekelian on March 22, as they sail into some kind of chasm consistent with hollow earth tales (214–17). Johnson inverts Poe's ending, providing two Black survivors, the White Pym, as well as the remains of Peters. Pym also drops dead upon sighting a half-naked brown-skinned man on the shore of what is assumed to be Tsalal on March 22. The novel ends with Chris's observation, "On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority" (322). Johnson undoes Poe's racism with his black-skinned characters by indicating how the most prominent skin tone across the globe is brown, somewhere in between white and black. He emphasizes this point in having the remains of the mulatto Peters survive the journey, the only evidence that Chris Jaynes has of his adventure.

Scholarly opinion differs greatly on the meaning of Johnson's indefinite closing. Richard Kopley believes that "[i]n both novels, then, regardless of the racial view advanced, the conclusion offers an image of transformative purity."⁵¹ Kimberly C. Davis thinks, "[t]he word choice for Johnson's last phrase—'a collection of brown people' who constitute the 'majority' of the planet—intentionally echoes the rhetoric of world dominance by people of color that is a standard feature of Pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism."⁵² Wilks writes, "In sending Chris and Garth to a place where Blackness and Whiteness have mingled to such a degree that they have ceased to be distinct categories, Johnson suggests a need to engage with multiculturalism not as an empty ideal but as a lived reality."⁵³ Julie A. Fiorelli articulates that "The focus on 'brown people' here suggests an escape within the global context from America's myopic obsession with the Black-white binary and presents the possibility of human perception and description delinked from racial categories (they are just 'brown')."⁵⁴ But that is the wonder of an ambiguous ending in that we as readers will never really know. In any event, Johnson has already invalidated [End Page 97] Chris Jaynes's imaginary account with the two-page preface before the novel even starts by having Chris tell us that he returned to the United States from his "extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere" and related his story to Mr. Johnson (3), annulling the apocalypse and completing the transhistoric feedback loop.

Johnson's satirical Afrofuturist novel—part neo-slave narrative, part captivity narrative, part science fiction, part utopia, part comedy—explores the truth of a post-racial moment that never existed in the first place with complex characters and an intricate plot taken from a past that wants to be forgotten by most White Americans. Many of whom would like to avoid the guilt, while simultaneously chaining Blacks to the past so they will always suffer from its remembrance, however slight. Ultimately, Poe's novel argues for the permanence of race while Johnson's novel nullifies the ridiculousness of skin color, calling for further emancipation from this harmful social construct. Indeed, Johnson uses satire to inform us of our limitations as a divided people while blasting apart the unquestioned racial assumptions of Poe that ghost into our present America resulting in the lasting inequalities of anti-Blackness. Afrofuturism provides a chance at hope and the change that comes with it.